What fun, what entertainment. And rare: One seldom sees the collapse of a landmark society in a rush of wondrous idiocy. Would I could sell tickets. Don’t look at it as a loss, but as a show, an unwanted but grand amusement.

The coup de grace in our ripening decadence is the current uprising purportedly, though implausibly, over racism. But never mind. The causes don’t matter. The deal is done.

Still, it is interesting to recognize that the protesters are, perhaps deliberately, confusing the incapacity of blacks with systemic racism. In truth, America has made the greatest effort ever essayed by one race to uplift another. Reflect: In 1954 an entirely white Supreme Court unanimously ended segregation. Later it found the use of IQ tests by employers illegal because blacks scored poorly, then found “affirmative action,” racial discrimination against whites, legal (hardly oppression of blacks, this). An overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act the next year. A white President sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. There has been an enormous flow of charity to blacks: Section Eight Housing, AFDC, Head Start, hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments. We now have free breakfasts for black children, then free lunches, in addition to outright welfare. In aggregate they resemble a distributed guaranteed basic income. Which is interesting.

These measures sprang from the best of intentions. Most I think should continue. I for one do not want to evict blacks from public housing or have their children go hungry. Yet none of these programs has had its desired effect. The crucial academic gap has not closed, crime remains horribly high, illegitimacy verges on universal. This is a great shame. Blacks are decent enough people, likable if they don’t hate you, and phenomenally talented. But it hasn’t worked.

Nothing has worked. There is no indication that anything will. The great black cities are in something approaching custodial care.

You cannot solve a problem without knowing what it is. This we dare not know. Democracies, however approximate, cannot deal with chronically underperforming minorities.

They cannot even try. Anything that might help is politically impossible, and anything politically possible won’t help.

So, after the riots:

Social division will worsen after the riots. Racial hostility from blacks will not decrease because their conditions will not change. The rioters are getting their way now, and rule, but at the price of sowing hatred. At best we will have many decades of ugly rancor. At worst, we are winding the spring for another outburst.

Multiculturalism has not worked, quite apart from race, and will not. White Americans are not one people. The poor communications and bad roads that once allowed them to live almost separately no longer exist. In its writ-large form, trying to force West Virginia to accept the culture of Massachusetts will produce only anger.

The likelihood of amity between races is proportional to their agreement on values important to them. For example, the Chinese share (what once were) the white values of study, work, courtesy, and obedience to the law. That they eat with chopsticks and celebrate New Year on the wrong day doesn’t matter.

However, again for example, a culture that believes in female genital mutilation and utter subjection of women cannot live amicably with a culture that abhors these things. Black ghetto culture and white are immiscible in so many fundamental values that they will not live well together.

Some cultures can assimilate, for example East Asian and American white, Latino and American white. But, in addition to sharply different cultures, too many blacks live in sprawling, racially isolated urban centers with almost no contact with the outside world other than television.

Censorship will intensify, not just of communications and office chitchat but of books. Tom Sawyer will be pulled from bookshelves or—Amazon being the continental shelf—or bowderlized to remove the Nigger Jim and Injun Joe The Nigger of the Narcissus may survive because none of the blacks and few of the whites will ever have heard of Conrad. At least for the foreseeable future, firings for anything imaginably redolent of racism–saying “All lives matter,” for example–will be snatched at in a mixture of passive aggression and schadenfreude to result in firings. This is unlikely to have a happy ending.

Schooling: Watching great universities become sandboxes for unpleasantly righteous dimwitted brats galls, or does if one lets it. I don’t. Most of the protesters seem recently to have erupted from the drains of an educational system that has been in sharp decline for decades They, including the intelligent among them, appear historically not just ignorant but carefully misinformed, culturally pathetic, and intellectually laughable. (For example, a protestress interviewed by a British reporter as to what she thought of Churchill said she couldn’t really say because she hadn’t met him. How many in BLM can spell “Confederacy”? A statue of Ulysses Grant was pulled down in the belief that he was a Confederate general. May God preserve us.)

The, uh, redaction of culture will not stop with books. Classical music is too white, the sciences too white, mathematics a tool of oppression (meaning that blacks cannot understand it) and so on. We have created a nation of pampered and imbecile peasants.

Schooling will continue its plummet. Science departments probably will not be abolished. However, because they are too white, schools will recruit hopelessly unqualified black students and professors, standards will fall yet more, and mathematics will be played down even in astrophysics (this is being done). Extirpating racism will replace scholarship, already degraded by the retirement or death of those professors who knew what education meant. This will inevitably result in lowered American technological competitiveness and prosperity. There is no hope of preventing this.

The replacement of learned professors by aging detritus from the Sixties antagonistic to scholarship is not surprising. America has had strong anti-intellectual undercurrent since its inception. The degradation will not be noticed by the young as they have never lived in a world different from their own, with Harry Potter and Toni Morrison thought to be literature. A liberal education was once the mark of the cultivated, being deep in languages, literature, philosophy, the sciences, history, mathematics,. Universities once had, at least among the better students, a love of open minded curiosity, thought, and debate. No more. Future historians will notice the shift, but those within it will not. We are left with a nation of morons who will not know they are morons.

This too cannot be prevented. Jejune herdthink is now warmly espoused throughout the academy with children in grade school being primed for it.

The most—I dare not say “entertaining” for fear of lynching, but, well, perhaps “interesting” reforms will be those of the police, whether abolition, defunding to shift money to youth outreach and rehab (which don’t work) or replacement of police by warm and caring adults, will result in increased crime. We need not concern ourselves with whether and to what extent the police have been culpable in which cases. The changes will come anyway.

An intriguing question is what the nonviolent, non-racist, warm and fuzzy pseudopolice will do when they encounter violent criminals. Counsel them on social justice? I would love to watch.

This will be a disoriented essay. These are disorienting times. Perhaps the reader should prepare himself with a double shot of Wild Turkey throat sanitizer, or a doob.

I am still getting mail saying that Floyd’s death was due to underlying conditions. I see. By purest coincidence, he died of natural causes while hand-cuffed, face down, with cops kneeling on him. Nothing could be more natural.

Autopsies: Pick any two of three.

Anyway, all of America and much of the rest of the world has lost its everlovin’ mind. You probably didn’t think of this. That’s how this column is. Full of original ideas.

OK, the sacking of America. Peaceful protesters have a point, though they may not be sure what it is. Bless them. The looters and arsonists should be shot. Back when the country was mostly white and law abiding, it would have made sense. The burning of a family’store by urban savages should, obviously I hope, not be allowed.

But the pillagers are overwhelmingly black. Expecting them to behave as if civilized would be racist, and intolerant, and cultural imperialism, and discrimination, and just like Hitler. So they hunt and gather at will, shrieking in ebonics and streaming from stores with bags of booty. It is the same in every riot. No, most blacks are not looters. Yes, many are horrified by it. Yes, blacks are human beings and have feelings like everybody else, etc. It remains that looting and burning are a black game.

What politician is going to order the shooting of hundreds of black Americans?

Why always blacks? Depressingly, the most parsimonious explanation, consistent with all of the facts, is that blacks cannot function well in a modern society. They never have, anywhere, do not, and seem unlikely to. The underlying cause appears to be low average intelligence and, perhaps, poor impulse control. They interpret apparently inevitable failure as systemic racism. The very real fact of past mistreatment changes nothing. This will not improve because it cannot. What now?

Again, many blacks oppose looting. Al Sharpton says looters are criminals and should be punished. The rap artist Lil Wayne said it is unreasonable to think all police are bad. Here we see that good sense comes in a plain brown rapper, like pornography.

OK, to brass tacks. The proximate cause of riots is always that white men have done something bad to blacks, like kill them. If in fact sometimes they have not, blacks believe that they have, encouraged by the media. Martin Luther King, Rodney King (no relation), Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, George Floyd. The police are the customary agents of ignition. Technical details, such as guilt or innocence, do not seem to matter.

If policing blacks with white cops leads to burning cities, why keep doing it?

It’s like a man hitting his thumb with a hammer. Whackawhack. “Ouch! That really hurts!” Whackawhack. “Ouch! That really hurts” Whackawhack. “Ouch! That really hurts”

“So why don’t you stop?”

“…whut?”

And of course there is a lot of misbehavior by police, which until recently was seldom detected. Question: For a cop, what are the most terrifying words he will hear? Cancer? Pay cut? Doughnut shortage? No.

“Cell phone.”

This current ruction could be called, perhaps a bit too breathlessly, the first electronic world uprising. A cell phone video began it, went viral, and got picked up by the legacy media, which have mostly followed cellphone footage. The networks are too politically correct, too short on manpower, to compete with millions of iPhone videographers. When the Buffalo cops knocked an old man down and casually walked away as he lay unconscious and bleeding from the head, within hours the entire earth saw it. Violeta and I, in central Mexico, have watched live coverage of Washington on Australian television.

We are seeing (Fred said importantly) a new paradigm.

Now, applied stupidity. It would be easy to believe that the police are actually trying to spark riots. If you think idiocy is not normal with today’s gendarmes, consider Breonna Taylor. She, a black EMT, was in bed with her boyfriend after midnight in Louisville. The police, under a no-knock warrant, using a battering ram, with no warning, crashed into her apartment. Her boyfriend, wakened by the intrusion, thought the couple were being attacked by god knew who. Reasonably, he fired a pistol at them, hitting a cop in the leg. The cops responded by shooting Breonna eight times, killing her.

With a predictability that makes Congressional corruption seem a long shot, the police said that, actually, see, they knocked and announced that they were police.

The police are lying. First, you don’t get a no-knock warrant and then knock, calling out that you are police. Second, if the police announce themselves, a guy in bed with his girlfriend will get up and open the door.

However: What happens when police have done a cowboy battering-ram I’m-a-really-cool-SWAT-guy enhanced entrance, and then discover that they have killed a young woman? Easy. They suddenly remember that they knocked. Since they have killed the only other witness, they can get away with it.

Perhaps an autopsy report will say that she died of underlying conditions. Yes, of natural causes, by purest coincidence while being shot eight times. Happens all the time.

The Breonna murder, like the Floyd trophy animal technique, was inverse PR genius. There must be a manual on this. Can you think of a more preternaturally foolish approach to race relations? You don’t shoot the guy you are supposed to be arresting. No. You kill his girlfriend. What brilliant police work. Awesome.

Of course, blacks kill far more whites than whites kill blacks, whether cops or anyone else. but this doesn’t fit the desired narrative. The media hide the (extremely) lopsided kill ratio. Anyone interested in black-on-white murder might read Their Lives Matter Too, by Paul Kersey.

Sez me, there is only one way to end the recurring riots: Have white cops police whites, and black cops police blacks. Separate departments would further reduce antagonism. Let blacks decide whether and how they want to be policed and let them do it. Since the races don’t like each other and separate when allowed, semi -autonomous urban regions might be a good idea.

But this would not be the American way. When you have done something for decades that hasn’t worked, isn’t working, and isn’t going to work, why, keep doing it. Whackawhack.

If I were a goofy tooth-fairy liberal, I would probably say that the policy strives for diversity and inclusion. Which nobody seems to want, but what has that got to do with it?

At this point in our study of applied, and even inspired, stupidity, we will now Have Thoughts and Draw Conclusions. These will be obvious to everybody but I will package them as insight. Hey I’m a columnist.

It was murder, plain and simple. There are no contradictory witnesses, no he-said-she-said. It is on the video, with no lapses. The man on the ground is clearly heard imploring mercy, begging to be allowed to breathe. Onlookers also implore. The officer knows the man is choking, yet keeps choking him. No police protocol calls for kneeling on the neck of an unresisting and handcuffed man. It was murder. It probably was sadism.

The police said he resisted arrest. They were lying. The surveillance video makes it plain. (Apparently they didn’t know that they were on camera.)

So why were they not arrested? An arrest by police requires “probable cause,” defined approximately as “ an articulable reason for believing that a specific person is committing a specific crime.” Would not having clearly identifiable perps committing the crime on video, plus audio, provide an articulable reason?

This was not like the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, in which the cop was telling the truth, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, in which what happened remains murky, or Eric Garner in New York, in which a grand jury voted not to charge the cop.

This time there is no doubt at all. Murder. The Minneapolis police killed him, one doing it and the others looking on. These three made no effort to stop what they could see and hear perfectly. In Minnesota, does this make them accessories? I don’t know. They were not taken into custody, suggesting that the Minneapolis police saw nothing wrong with it until the video surfaced. How many other things have they regarded similarly?

No excuse for the killing is possible. Floyd was arrested on suspicion of passing a counterfeit bill, which he may or may not have known to be bogus. It doesn’t matter. The law doesn’t allow the police to kill on suspicion of passing counterfeit money. Did he have a police record? I don’t know. Neither did the cops. It doesn’t matter. The law does not permit cops to kill for having a record.

White Nationalist sites, as for example Vdare, seek to justify it, which is impossible.

White Nationalists have a following because much of what they say is true. Blacks do in fact commit a great deal of crime. Blacks do in fact commit brutal racial attacks on whites, many of them (one of many dozens I’ll bet you have never heard of it. ) and the media do in fact hide them. Massive immigration does in fact cause massive problems. The endless trendy vilification of whites wearies. Affirmative action against whites in favor of blacks and Hispanics reasonably causes anger.

But White Nationalists in their sullen racial hatred, their lack of interest in right and wrong, are little better than Black Lives Matter–often slicker, more polished, but no better. When they defend clear murder, as they do in this case, they lose all moral authority and show themselves to be exactly what leftists say they are.

In Minneapolis blacks, as usual, showed themselves to be exactly what their critics say they are: violent, thieving, uncontrolled. Not all were thus of course, but enough always are. Don’t think so? Look at the video. They speak of justice, but always loot and burn. It is not clear how burning a store and stealing TVs contributes to justice. They will then complain that there are no stores in the neighborhood, and blame this on racism.

The protests were entirely justified. The looting and arson were not. Of course, as my wife pointed out, without the destruction nothing would be done. The government would have waited out peaceful demonstrations. Officials would say It wouldn’t do to jump to conclusions. It would take time to gather all the evidence, get the results of the autopsy. There would be a study, perhaps a commission, even a panel, and an in-depth investigation to get to the bottom of this tragic event. The crowds would dwindle as people had to go back to work. Case closed. Burning down a dozen or two of city blocks, while not excusable, does get official attention. Nothing else seems to.

Speaking of attention, the original cell phone video has by now been all over the world, along with the looting and incendiarism (though YouTube has disappeared it). It’s those damned smartphones. In a planet of videographers, the dirty linen is hard to hide. The riots, the arson, the lawlessness of both the cops and the American Uighurs they seek to control, the many tens of thousands in filthy homeless encampments on the sidewalks–these are as visible in Kathmandu and Guadalajara as they are in Des Moines: Breaking news from the throbbing heart of democracy, human rights, and exceptionalism. How must this look in civilized countries such as Finland, Norway, China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore?

Blacks complain constantly about the brutality of police. Does it exist? Yes. You bet it does. Obviously not all cops are brutal, some departments are worse than others, but it assuredly exists. I say this having spent nine years as police reporter for the Washington Times.

Cops are not stupid enough to beat blacks in front of a reporter, but friends on various departments have told me of many such incidents, so I have seen little brutality, (though a cop in Chicago did force an Hispanic guy to strip to the waist in freezing winter wind to try to make him confess to something he probably hadn’t done.)

Perhaps worse than beatings in leading to riots is the constant humiliation inflicted on blacks by cops. In case you want examples:

I was riding one night with the LAPD in South Central with two burly guys, mid-twenties, swatted out, 870 in the rack behind, nightsticks. A late model black car, a Buick or something on that order, rolled a stop sign. The cops pulled it. Immediately both doors of the squad were open, cops standing behind them, leveling pistols toward the offending car. The following is from old memory, but close:

“Show me your hands. Step out of the vehicle. Walk backwards toward my voice. Get down on your knees. Put your hands behind your head. Interlace your fingers.”

The man was in a suit. His wife was in the car. This, for rolling a stop sign on a deserted street. If this had happened to me, which it never would, I would spend the rest of my life wanting to kill every white cop on the planet.

Another? Riding on Capitol Hill, maybe two a.m. Streets dark and empty. Down an alley, visible by a light on the back of a building, we saw a black man taking a leak. Technically, urinating in public, a misdemeanor. Realistically, something every man has done and, late at night on a deserted alley, ignorable. Instead the cop subjected him to a humiliating tongue-lashing of several minutes, said he could arrest him, etc, while the man, maybe forty-five, said “Yessir, yessir, yessir.” What choice did he have? Cops can do anything on dark streets.

Or: In the black Austin district of Chicago, in a residential neighborhood, the cop I was with was in plain clothes, the car unmarked. He had stopped to talk to someone, nothing hostile but I forget about what. On the sidewalk an old black man, maybe sixty, walked slowly past and the cop said, “Hey, wait, I want to talk to you, “ or something similar.

The man didn’t hear and kept walking. The cop rushed over, grabbed him by the shirtfront, and shouted into his face, “When I say stop, you fucking stop, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

“Yessuh, yessuh, yessuh.”

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

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.”