OK, every self-respecting columnist is writing about that wretched virus, so I suppose I have to. (Actually any self-respecting columnist is probably delusional. but never mind.) Columnists do what they are programmed to do, like bugs.

I think I’m supposed to say that the coronavirus is most perilous, and like the Black Death that is thought to have killed a third of Europe in 1348. Well, if a million people died in the US, it would be less than a third of one percent of the population. If we want to beat the Black Death we had better get cracking. So far we don’t even have a tenth of a million, though we are working on it. So we are at less than a tenth of a third of one percent.

I don’t know. I’m patriotic and all, and like to see America being a light to the world in pauses in bombing it, and setting an example. I don’t have much hope. Unless we start injecting Lysol like the Main Cockatoo says.

We will begin our discussion with a dose of sanity. If we can find any. It’s pretty scarce on the ground in this plague. I imagine dead bodies piled everywhere, whole hecatombs of them. (This column believes in up-town Greek words. It’s a toney column, after all. The trick is to throw them off casually as if you barely noticed. Don’t let the reader suspect that you have spent ten minutes devising a run-up to them so they look natural.)

Anyway, sanity. This miserable virus breeds all manner of conspiracy theories, most of them negligible. The Chloroquine Concealment story may actually persuade people to dose themselves with a drug they don’t understand. We have Pepe Escobar, a columnist appearing in Asia Times among several other places. He asserts that to his certain knowledge the French government is hiding a “cheap, tested” sure-fire cure, chloroquine. Yes, hiding it. The results of a French study, he says, show that chloroquine, a well-known antimalarial drug, is a cure.

So why are the French dying like mayflies in a bug zapper? Because the French government doesn’t want to save its people’s lives. And why this? So that Big Pharma can find a vaccine and get rich.

Saith Pepe, “… major collusion scandal in which the French government is helping Big Pharma to profit from the expansion of Covid-19.”

He is sure of this. And maybe also of poltergeists, though he hasn’t said so.

Chloroquine discovered in 1934, has been extensively used by large numbers of people for long periods. It is in the public domain. If it protects against the virus, Why not just put everybody on it en masse? Problem solved, no masks or ventilators need apply. No?

The tale has all the earmarks of the classic nutball conspiracy theory. It is fundamentally implausible (Macron is letting thousands of the French die and crippling the economy for the benefit of one industry, Big Pharma). It relies on blind sourcing and unsupported assertion. It requires the complicity of tens of thousands in the French medical community, none of whom spills the beans and saves thousands. Since chloroquine’s alleged effectiveness has been published on sites of large circulation, such as the Unz Review and Lew Rockwell, as well as being touted by Trump, it would seem not to be particularly well hidden.

Yet no country has jumped on this simple, cheap means of saving its population. it follows that...all the world’s governments are in on the conspiracy! Yes! The entire governmental earth.plots to make money for Big Pharma. And the media are hiding it, so they must be in on it. All bought off by Big pharma.

Why didn’t I think of that?

What I want to know is where the damned thing came from. On one hand it came from eating bats in Wuhan, for which there is no evidence so we will defend the story furiously. But actually it leaked from a Chinese germ-war lab, except that it was seen in California, like Elvis, before it appeared in China. Except those squinty-eyed rascals let it loose on their own people, because they’ve got so many they don’t mind losing ten or twenty million, hardly notice them, so it would spread to America and destroy the economy. Except, really, the Pentagon sent it to China with an athletic team–I guess it was going to play shortstop or something–to destroy China,

See? We’ve got the origin nailed down.

Now, as I understand it, the Head Witch Doctor in the White House for weeks kept saying, shucks, t’ain’t nothing, why, no worse than a head cold, just think about something else, folks, don’t worry your pretty little heads about a thing. Then it turned out the DOW didn’t have antibodies and dropped like a prom dress, and that was serious, so he went into hyperdrive and started blaming China for not saying anything for weeks, just like he didn’t either.

Here, a parenthesis. (See? More sky-brow Greek words.) Anyway, I’m never sure. Are tweets those email things, and twits the people who send them, or are twits the messages….?

What I can’t get a handle on is who the virus is dispatching to a Better Place. (I’m not religious, but almost any place would be better than New York in summer.) Yes, we hear that being morbidly fat doesn’t help, or having diabetes, or fifth-stage cancer, or being old, or already dead. Actually, we could have guessed as much. But what are the actual numbers? Of a thousand people infected, how many die? Of a thousand symptomatic people, however defined, how many die? What is the breakdown by age for otherwise healthy people? In short, now dangerous is the foul molecule to whom? Why don’t we know?

Easy. Because the US response has been chaotic, incompetent, unprepared, ridiculous, embarrassing, and ineffectual. Nothing that should have been stocked was. Because the First Source of Tweets is more interested in reelection than in the country. Because it turns out that the All-Galactic Omnipower, feared unto the Crab Nebula for is gaudy aircraft carriers and stupid bombers, can’t supply its people with face-masks–you know, little piece of cloth, two strings. Or just one stretchy string.

Actually, I have my own conspiracy theory. The virus was designed in a Jewish biowarfare lab deep under Manhattan to provide clients for the Rosenthal Happy Bye-Bye chain of morgues, and incidentally to supply an organ-harvesting network run by Mossad to do experiments on Palestinian orphans. But Bill and Melinda Gates heard of it and bought it to infect bats. These were sent to China under the influence of a suspended-animation drug invented by the Nazis. (This explains why Hitler has been seen at a donut shop in Buenos Aires.) Bill and Mel knew that the virus would come back to America where the lock-down would let the government impose totalitarianism, destroy our freedoms, and make everybody take vaccines and get chips implanted in their heads.

Ha! Escobar has met his match.

A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be”

Amazon review: “Another collection of Fred’s Fred on Everything columns, seditious, outrageous, inflammatory, evilly funny. Fred dislikes everything he is supposed to like, and likes everything he is supposed to dislike. He likes downscale bars, thinks bar girls are decent human beings, approves of dogs, motorcycles, and really loud blues. He detests wars, which he has seen several of, loathes ugly feminists with politically significant hairy armpits, believes that congressmen would serve well as skeet, and proposes to tie everyone on Wall Street to an anvil and drop it in a river. Obviously he is

Write Fred at [email protected]. put the letters “pdq” anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion.

The genius of America’s totalitarian system of government is that it is not totally total, and sometimes not very totalitarian at all. It is just total enough. Truly total government–“Your papers, citizen,” stop-and-frisk, permission needed to travel from city to city–might spark revolt. By contrast, a sufficiency of totalitarianism, but not an excess, keeps the populace in adequate torpidity. Thus done astutely, totalitarianism is hardly noticed.

The founder of this philosophy was that rascal, Abe Lincoln. As we have all heard in what has become almost a cliche, he said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” He wisely did not add, “…but you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.”

Lincoln’s Principle of Sufficiency is the First Pillar of Practical Totalitarianism. The Second Pillar is reliance on the private sector for effectuation. This gives the government plausible deniability. For example, Google has all your email for decades back, This is annoying but not truly alarming. If the federal government (openly) collected emails, conservatives would shriek about…totalitarianism. But Google isn’t the government–is it?

The Third pillar: A press not too noticeably controlled, with enough apparent difference of opinion to simulate savage debate of ideas–without touching on any important ones. For example, Rachel Maddow rattles that Trump is a Russian agent while Rush Limbaugh, the Rachel Maddow of the Right, demurs furiously. This allows people to be excited and engaged without endangering either Wall Street or the military budget.

Hermetic control of information isn’t needed, and would be noticed. Most people get most of their news from the lobotomy box. Anything that doesn’t appear on the flickering screen doesn’t exist for most, and these are enough. It is thus possible to suppress information not by suppressing it, but by ignoring it.

We have now listed the fundamentals of American government. Now let us examine the use and intersection of these principles here and abroad.

China is typically offered as practicing the blackest totalitarianism, the implicit contrast being with the enlightened democracy enjoyed by Americans. For example, we are told that In China, everything you say or do is monitored. Obviously China is a most terrible place. Who could doubt it?

By contrast, in America, cameras are everywhere, all email is recorded, every bank transaction, credit-card purchase, who you called by telephone and when, and of course criminal records. Depending on location, traffic lights photograph your license number if you run a light (and for all you know, if you don’t), license-plate readers check for stolen vehicles and (perhaps) delete legal plates. Cell towers know approximately where you and Google Maps knows to within a few feet. Locations can be cross-checked with those of other phones to see who you were with. Now face-recognition comes along.

Since little of this is directly done by the federal government, we do not live in a surveillance state. After all, none of the entities involved would share their information with the feds–would they?

In China,we are told, there is no freedom of expression. Well, actually there is, as long as you don’t say the wrong things about the wrong things. In America we have freedom of speech. It says so in the Constitution.

Well, we have freedom of speech as long as we don’t say the wrong things about the wrong things. We all know what we can’t say and who we can’t say it about. In many places, certainly in the media where you might influence others, you can lose your job for saying things that upset blacks, Jews, feminists, homosexuals, LBGQXYZs, Hispanics, or Muslims. In the media you cannot say anything if favor of the Second Amendment, against abortion, about black crime, against the military budget or the wars. You cannot doubt accounts of such events as the Trayvon Martin adventure. On the web, sites can be and increasingly are “deplatformed” by the social media.

But as these are not formally part of government, we have freedom of speech. See? No unelected dictator decides what we are permitted to know or say. Mark Zuckerberg does.

This is very different from China in that…in that…wait. I’ll think of something.

Here we come to the Fourth Pillar of Sufficient Totalitarianism: Repetition, repetition, repetition. In Mein Kampf (now removed from Amazon) Adolf said that propaganda should not be entrusted to.intellectuals They are, he said, easily bored, like sophisticated ideas, and constantly want to change the message.

Instead, he said, keep it simple enough for the masses to understand, and say it over and over and over, and they will come to believe it. More precisely, enough will come to believe it. The rest don’t matter. This is much cheaper than kicking in doors at three a.m. and doesn’t arouse potentially dangerous resentment

RussiaGateRussiaGateRussiaGateChinaDidItChinaDidItChinaDidItIranIsEvilIranIsEvilIranIsEvilGoYoBeginningAndRepeat

We are told, over and over and over, that America is a democracy and virtually choking on freedoms. We are told three times in a half hour during the Super Bowl, that we need to buy a sandwich from Subway. Same principle, exactly. It works.

Here we come to the Bicephalous Monoparty, the stage set of American democracy. In this production, actors called Republicans and Democrats feign combat. It is like professional wrestling but without the dignity. By Instinct or prearrangement they avoid mention of things that might produce restiveness among the electorate: Wall Street, the military budget, corruption, corporate price-fixing, or Epstein’s ability to hang himself from a bedstead two feet shorter than himself. It is prettily done. By engaging the glands of the multitude with shiny political baubles–transgender bathrooms, making America great again–the avoid endangering larceny as usual.

And so, unlike China where democracy does not exist and people have no influence, we have democracy but no influence. This is much slicker.

For example, if you oppose the interminable wars, what party do you vote for? There are neither antiwar parties nor serious candidates. Who do you vote for if you want to cut the goiterous military budget? If you are against torture? If you oppose a militarily aggressive foreign policy?

Can you influence what your children are taught in school, what is in their textbooks? If you are against the ongoing enstupidation of education, or against the pulling down of statues? Against affirmative action? The list could go on.

Thank God we don’t live in China. Their government works, ours doesn’t, but at least we have our freedoms.

Write Fred at [email protected]. Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion.

Nekkid in Austin

Amazon review: “Essays on America, life, politics, and just about everything. The author chronicles among other adventures an aging stripper in Austin, dressed in a paper-mache horse, who had with her a cobra and a tarantula like a yak-hair pillow with legs and alternately charmed and terrified a room full of cowboys sucking down Bud and…. Fred was an apostle of the long-haul thumb during the Sixties and saw…many things. He tells of standing by the big roads across the desert, rockin in the wind blast of the heavy rigs roaring by and the whine of tires and dropping into an arroyo at night with a bottle of cheap red and watching the stars and perhaps smoking things not approved by the government. He tells of..well, that’s what the book is for. Join him.”

The most portentous events in American history were the enforced importation of African blacks by the New England slavers, and the opening of the southern border to Latin America. Both have proved disastrous. Compulsory mixing of disparate peoples has not worked.

In response to the Latino influx, Nativist groups arose to oppose immigration and (not the same thing) immigrants. Typically, Nativist hostility remains until the newcomers assimilate, if they do, and stop being disparate. Blacks haven’t done this. With Latinos, it is a work in progress.

Nativism Is far from new to America, and not always racial. The KKK Revival of the 1920s, far more successful than today’s Nativists, opposed chiefly not blacks but Catholic Irish and Italians. As late as the 1960s an argument against JFK as President was that he was Catholic and the Pope would control America. Today this seems silly. It didn’t then.

The Nativists of today, very similar to those of yore, Protestant, Nordic, and angry, speaking of an almost sacred white America, call themselves White Nationalists, the Alt Right, the Dissident Right, Immigration Patriots, and so on. Do they amount to anything? Or will they, like earlier Nativists, fade away, having accomplished little?

They will fade, methinks. They lack the horsepower to start an uprising, the votes to pass major policies, support in Congress, the courts, or the media. The immigrants are numerous enough that neither party is going to antagonize them. And the crafty brown rascals aren’t behaving badly enough to change this.

A Few Facts

Fact One: Some sixty million Hispanics live in the US, mostly and increasingly citizens, along with an unknown but substantial number of illegals.

Fact Two: They are in America to stay. The citizens cannot be deported. Nobody is going to force tens of millions, legal or otherwise, across the Mexican border. If you think otherwise, you need to stop smoking that brass polish. It isn’t good for you.

Fact Three: Intermarriage with whites is high, will remain high, and very likely increase. Latin Americans are attractive people. Nativists may regard them as repellent on ideological grounds, but this will remain a minority view among young white men.

(You ask: Why will intermarriage increase? Because increasingly the Hispanics speak native English. Language and accent are sharp markers of difference. Lupita Gutierrez, nineteen, speaking flawless American English (as distinct from Hisbonics), pretty, talking about the same movies as everyone else and pecking at her telephone, will repel few young white men.)

Fact Four: Pace the Nativists, America is not a white country. Maybe it should be, or could have been, or something, but it isn’t. It is roughly thirteen percent black, at least eighteen percent Hispanic, and several percent Asian, in total more than a third non-white. You can applaud this, deplore it, jump up and down and screech, or think warm fuzzy thoughts about inclusiveness. When you are through, the numbers will be exactly the same.

Fact Five: Increasingly, Hispanics vote.

Together the foregoing suggest that Nativism, if not a dead letter, is at least a dying letter, with time working against it. Maybe a ventilator would help.

Some Political Demographics

Geography and concentration increase the political leverage of minorities. If they were distributed evenly across the country, Nativists and sympathizers might outvote them. They are not so distributed. Blacks are concentrated in the downtowns of cities in the North, South, and Midwest, and control them, or nearly do, by ballot or sheer numbers. They tend to bloc vote, giving them great heft among Democrats and causing fear among Republicans. This is not going to change.

Latinos dominate, or shortly will, in the states of the Southwest. If Nativists make an electoral fight of it in these states, they will lose. Republicans might think about this.

Lost Cause Department

Judging by their websites, Nativists believe, or try to, that Real Americans will shortly awake from their slumber in fury at the pollution of their country, rise in a tsunami of white racial solidarity, and do…something. Just what isn’t clear.

Various problems afflict this understanding. Many liberals think of themselves as Real Americans. They too vote. We would then have competing tsunamis. Young whites, such as university students, seem less disturbed by immigration than their elders. Blacks vote Demographic regardless of immigration. Whether some, any, or all of this makes sense doesn’t matter. It happens. A successful tsunami seems unlikely.

Who Thinks What

Nativists (correctly) cite polls showing that the public regards immigration as a serious problem. From this they conclude that the majority of Americans agree with them in their antipathies. But agree with them about what?

Consider a spectrum of possible policies toward illegals arranged in ascending order of improbability: Deport MS-13. Close the border. End birthright citizenship. End welfare and drivers licenses for illegals. End medical care for them. Declare the DACA people illegal and deport all 850,000 of them. Pull third-grade children of illegals sobbing from their classrooms and leave them on the sidewalks (in front of 12,000 network cameras). Deport all illegals. Outlaw intermarriage. Establish legal segregation. Death camps.

While Nativists seem to favor all of these except the last–perhaps except the last–the general public would begin to fall off earlier in the list. Note the large number of sanctuary cities, counties, and states that refuse to cooperate with ICE. Remember again that liberals think they are Americans, and they too vote. While Nativists would happily contemplate the humanitarian disasters caused by, say, mass deportation, much of the public would recoil.

All of these measures would leave the millions of citizens in place. Here is a point worth noting: Nativists have no policy suggestions regarding Hispanic citizens. Hatred is not a policy.

Race and Nativism: The Box

Politically, Nativists are in a box from which there is no exit. The box exists because their hostility to Hispanics (and blacks and Asians) is racial, not political or behavioral. The racial basis, implicit in much of their writing, is often explicitly stated. Yes, they speak of strewn trash and poor English, but race is their underlying concern. They are clear about it.

This matters. It is The Box. Since Hispanics cannot change their race, there is no room for compromise, accommodation, assimilation, or even a modus vivendi. Any of these would lead to intermarriage, which causes night horrors in Nativists.

Their thinking is starkly binary. White is good, everything else is bad: blacks, Indians (of either kind), Vietnamese, Chinese, Muslims (Nativists tend to regard Islam as a race), what have you. No shades exist, no degrees. It is White, and everyone else. The Box means that no matter what Hispanics do, no matter how many languages they learn, how many babies they fail to rape, Nativists will hate them. In a country more than a third non-white, this is not going to work.

The Political Consequences of the Binary Box

Nativists invariably are hardcore conservatives and so detest Democrats almost as much as they detest nonwhites. Yet by their attacks on Hispanics they seem determined to elect Democrats.

On Nativist sites one reads endlessly that Hispanics are filthy, don’t learn English, carry medieval diseases, molest orphans, can’t read, are stupid, attack teachers, hate America, and breed like flies. The Nativists are then outraged that the ungrateful bastards vote Democratic.

Damn! Who would have thought it?

The Refrigerator as Contraceptive

We will start this magisterial explanation of everything with the time-honored approach of the philosoñher, beginning with the things we know beyond doubt and then reasoning from them to suitably astonishing truths. As we know, Descartes began by saying, “Cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am.” (Ambrose Bierce, a more profound thinker, said, “Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum. Cogito.” Butthis way lies madness.) So with what certain knowledge can we begin our quest?

Our only certain knowledge is that we don’t have any. Acceptance of this condition will diminish the world’s output of philosophy, or so we may hope, but this column faces reality with a brave front. We may now list our certainties:

We don’t know where we came from, where we are, why, what if anything we should do while we are here, and where if anywhere we go when we die.

On this bedrock we shall construct our philosophy of everything. However, before we begin thinking about these profound matters, we need to take into account one more certainty:

Thinking is impossible.

I will explain. But what it comes to is that while we know nothing about which to think, it doesn’t matter because we couldn’t think about it if we did know something.

Why? Consider the brain. It is an electrochemical mechanism, blindly obeying the laws of physics and chemistry (chemistry being the physics of the interactions of atoms). For example, consider a nerve impulse propagating along a neural fiber, depolarizing, sodium in, potassium out. Pure chemistry and physics. When the impulse comes to a synapse, a neurotransmitter diffuses across the gap, pure chemistry and physics. It can’t do anything else. Even chemicals with long, imposing names cannot make choices. The neurotransmitter then binds to receptor sites, because it has to. Textbooks of neurophysiology state it thus: “A brain has less free will than a wind-up clock.” Or at least if it were so stated, it would be. This is close enough for philosophy.

Putting it precisely, the state of a physical system is determined entirely by its previous state. This establishes beyond doubt that we have no free will, and that what we think are thoughts were determined at the time of the Big Bang, if any.

Now, no philosophical essay can be held in repute unless it contains words ending “ism.” The reigning creed today is materialism, the philosophy of the wantonly inattentive. Many who believe in materialism are of high intelligence, and so can only be sufficiently inattentive by great effort.

Anyway, a materialist believes than nothing exists but space, time, matter, and energy, however hyphenated. That is, physics. As the physicist Joe Friday said.

“The physics, ma’am, just the physics, and nothing but the physics.”

This means that the Big Bang, if any, was set up, or I suppose I should say, set itself up, like one of those billiard-table trick shots. You know the kind: The balls seem randomly placed on the table but bounce around a lot before miraculously running into the pockets like birds returning to their nests. In the Bang, if any, all those subatomic whatsamajigggers erupted forth at exactly the right angles and velocities so that, billions of years later, they formed Elvis, San Francisco, and Hillary. (This had to be by chance, since no one in his right mind would form Hillary on purpose. QED.)

Next, consider plane geometry as taught in high school. (You may wonder why we have to consider it. Well, we just do.) Plane geometry deals with planes, lines, points, angles, and nothing else. It is useful and interesting, but it cannot explain a cheeseburger, Formula One race, or political hysteria. Why? Because cheeseburgers exist in three dimensions, which plane geometry doesn’t have. Formula One races involve matter, energy, and motion, which plane geometry also doesn’t have. Hysteria is an emotional state associated with liberal co-eds in pricey northern colleges who, thank God, do not exist in mathematics.

What it comes to is that a logical system is defined by its premises, and all downstream results are mere elaboration. (Of course, as established in the beginning of this luminous essay, we have no premises except the lack of premises, but philosophy readily overlooks such minor hindrances.) Plane geometry is not wrong. It is just incomplete.

To state it in mathematical terms, you cannot flatten a cheeseburger enough to fit into a plane.

Physics, the foundation of the current official story of everything, also depends on its premises. Physics is just mathematical materialism. From its equations one may derive all manner of fascinating and useful things, such as planetary motion, npn transistors, smartphones, nerve gas, and hydrogen bombs. (Some of these may be more useful than others.)

But, just as you cannot get strawberry milkshakes from plane geometry, because they are not implicit in it, there are things you cannot derive from the equations of physics: Consciousness, free will, beauty, morality, or curiosity–the whiches there just ain’t in physics. This would not worry a rational thinker. He (or, assuredly, she) would simply state the obvious: Physics is not wrong, but incomplete. It does what it does, and doesn’t do what it can’t. Not too mysterious, that.

However, the true-believing physics-is-all Neo-Darwinian matter-monger cannot admit that anything–anything at all–exists outside of physics. Since some things obviously do, the only-physics enthusiasts have to resort to contorted logic. I think of kite string in a ceiling fan. Or simple denial.

For example, sometimes they say that consciousness is merely an “epiphenomenon.” Oh. And what does that mean? Nothing. (Actually it means, “I don’t know, but if I use a polysyllabic Greek word, maybe nobody will notice.”) Epiphenomenon of what?

Sometimes they will say, “Well, consciousness is just a by-product of complexity.” But if consciousness is a byproduct what is the primary product? A computer is somewhat complex, so is it somewhat conscious? Is a mouse less conscious than a human or just, in some cases, less intelligent?

A materialist ignoring consciousness is exactly equivalent to a geometer ignoring cheeseburgers.

We will now examine the question, where did we come from? The answer is ready to hand: We don’t have a clue. We make up stories. The physics-only folk say, see, there was the Big Bang and all these electrons and protons and things flew out and just by chance formed Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in the most motingator a-stonishing pool-table trick shot ever set up. Just by accident. Damn! Who would have thought it?

Of course any sane person, to include materialists when they are thinking of something else, would say that TSMC was designed by hordes of Chinese engineers. But of course designing anything requires mind and intelligence (or a computer designed to simulate these things), But Mind cannot be derived from the equations of physics. Therefore we are all mindless. In general human behavior supports this.

Of course other stories exist. Yahweh created the world, or maybe Shiva, or Allah, and I think some remote tribes believe that it just appeared on the back of a giant turtle. I have no information on the matter, though frankly I incline to the turtle story, but will let the reader know the instant I find out.

The weakness of creation myths from Bang to Turtle is the question of the five-year-old, “But Mommy, where did God come from?” or “Who made God?” Fifteen years later in dorm-room bull sessions he will phrase it differently, “Well, what came before the Big Bang?” Same question.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years, because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot ’em.”

The first rule of human thought is that everything is somebody else’s fault. American whites note that violent crime is mostly committed by blacks or Hispanics, who see all their problems as due to whites. Terrorism is the domain of Muslems. Democrats blame everything on Republicans and vice versa.

Most of the world points out that America causes most of avoidable destruction and suffering on the planet. The Americans believe themselves virtuous, indispensable, exceptional, and entirely dedicated to promulgating democracy. No group is itself guilty of anything.

Nobody (except feminists) says the obvious, that all of these evils are committed by….

Men.

It is always men–some other men, of course, men of another race or country, or religion or tribe or social class. We ourselves–men–are pure. But however you cut it, it is men.

The crucial problem for humanity is, probably always has been, how to control men, how to to harness their vigor and inventiveness for the common good while restraining their penchant for destruction, mass homicide, individual mlurder, rape, pillage, depravity, and foolishness.

Wars are the vilest masculine behavior. They never end. Wars are not about anything. They are just wars. Men always find something for them to be about, but really they are just what men–men–do.

The martial urge is deep in the steroid chemistry. Little boys want to play with guns. If you force dolls upon them, they shoot each other with dolls. When grown up, to the extent they ever are, they fight wars. If there is no reason for war, as for example now, they invent reasons. The Russians are coming. The Chinese are coming. North Korea will nuke us. So will Iran. We must gird our loins and fight, fight, fight.

It is the behavior of a pack of dogs. For example, when an obsolete lumbering propeller-driven Soviet-era bomber approaches American air space, fighter pilots sprint for their planes and roar into the air–loud martial noises are important to men–to intercept the intruder, bow wow, arf, woof. They cannot in sanity think that the dread Russkis have sent a single slow plane to destroy America, but that, presumably due to nucleotide arrangement, is how they behave.

It is innate and starts early. When I was a little boy of twelve, my buddies Dukesy and Mincemeat and I often set out in our perfectly safe suburb to invade the equally perfectly safe nearby suburbs in search of action. We got into rock fights with other little boys who equally had no reason to get into rock fights. We were experiencing the germ of the hunting pack or war party. Girls did not do this.

If we had lived in the downtown of a city where the frail bonds of civilization are weaker, the next step would have been membership in urban gangs. These have both the behavior of the dog pack and the trappings of armies: insignia (baseball hats worn sideways or jackets of particular colors), territory (Rolling Eighties Crips), imposing titles (War Counselor), and brutal initiations (getting jumped in). There is, as with kids of twelve, the sense of belonging, the visceral appeal of concerted action, the adrenal pull of combat. Thus do we overcome the greyness of existence.

In 1916 in the battle of the Somme, England lost 20,000 dead–men–when their generals, men, ordered them to run across open ground covered by the fire of artillery and machine guns manned–note word–by German men. Can you imagine women being so goddam stupid? The war was caused, organized, and waged by, of course, men.

The world’s history consists chiefly of men killing each other and everybody else within reach. Cannae. Zama. Thermopylae, The Bulge. Bosworth Field. The Nile, Trafalgar. Yorktown. Antietam. Custer’s Last Stand. Borodin. Austerlitz. The Varian Disaster. Midway. You could fill encyclopedias with battles, none of them making sense.

In the American West, the men of the savage tribes constantly made war on other savage tribes to steal horses and women and get captives to torture. Spanish men made war on the Aztecs, who made war on everybody around them. Later, American men invaded Mexico to kill Mexican men, who wanted to kill the American men. The free will of army ants.

The literature of most peoples, chiefly written by men, glorifies war. The Iliad, the Anabasis, the Aeneid, Bhagavad Gita, the Old Testament, El Cid, the Gilgamesh Epic, Orlando Furioso. When men are not doing war, they write about war, talk about it, do high-fives in the O Club. In old age they fondly remember their wars as the most pungent and intense times they ever knew.

Men engaging in such behavior speak of honor. There is no honor in war, only hormonally mediated lunacy. Where is the honor in bombing cities, putting them to the sword, raping and looting? The perpetrators-men–care nothing for the horrors they infliict–Dresden, the Rape of Nanjing, Nagasaki, Nine-Eleven, the “pacification” of the Philippines after the American conquest.

Men. Can anyone deny this?

These days, when a thin patina of moralism lightly coats the public mind, soldiers–men–pride themselves on protecting their homelands, the national security, our precious values lauded but seldom practiced, and so forth. Why do countries need protecting? Because otherwise the men of other countries will attack. Our men must protect us against their men. Teddy Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” but men who carry big sticks cannot speak softly. They always want to use the stick.

The barbaric behavior of men is not restricted to soldiers. Watch documentaries about serial killers on YouTube. You will note that all are men. Men will kill thirteen women after torturing them at length, perhaps copulating with the corpse, will kidnap and rape a chilod of seven for three days before throwing her off a bridge (an actual case). Women do not do this. There is an occasional nurse poisoner and women sometimes kill their husbands, but we do not have Jane Wayne Gacys, Theodora Bundys, or Jessica Dahmers. Sexual torture-murders are, as we say, a male thing.

In cities like Chicago and Baltimore–there are many cities like these–barely organized black men–men–kill each other in hundreds. Black women do not. In Mexico, well organized criminal gangs kill each other in tens of thousand. Mexican women do not. In America, men kill with truly national enthusiasm , constantly attacking other countries and killing, killing, killing. A few women are involved as political baubles, but it is a man’s game. Which is how they regard it. As a game, an adventure.

The mass murderers of history–Joshua, Alexander, Timurlane, Genghis Khan, Titus, Napoleon, Pol Pot, Stalin, Adolf, Mao– were all–men.

In the past, men were not disingenuous about their moves. Conquering was expected of kings and emperors. They did it for its own sake. Alexander didn’t really need Afghanistan. Today men have to speak of spreading democracy and human rights and overthrowing evil dictators. Like wind-up victrolas they speak of duty, honor, country. They insist that war crimes are isolated incidents. In fact a war crime is business as usual that a reporter has heard about.

Short of genetic engineering, how can this grotesque misbehavior be controlled? The question is made difficult because men would have to do the controlling. They will not. They won’t give up their aircraft carriers and tanks and hero treehouses like the Green Berets.