"Mo' Money," Less Wealth (Second update 4/14)

You get mo' money from the Gub-MINT! Whiz and Ice, key economic advisers to the Obama regime (as well as its predecessor).


In comoedia veritas est.

In comedy, the truth is found.



As a 23-year-old "social organizer" in Chicago, Barrack Obama had an encounter that should have changed the way he looked at politics, were he in the habit of serious reflective thought.


Deployed as an Alinskyite "change agent" to Chicago's South Side, Obama made the acquaintance of a redoubtable woman identified as "Sadie" in his first memoir, Dreams of My Father. Sadie is described as one of Obama's "staunchest supporters" during his street-level work in pursuing what he calls "redistributive change."


Sadie, like many other poor residents of Chicago's inner city, wanted to believe in the gospel of statist wealth redistribution, but was somewhat weary of the way her grievances were being leveraged by those in charge of Chicago's political spoils system.


So it likely was with a mixture of affection and despair that Sadie informed the eager and youthful future president: "Ain't nothing gonna change, Mr. Obama. We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can."


Now, if Obama had been blessed with an insightful older mentor -- say, the equivalent of Sean Connery's wizened Chicago beat cop Jimmy Malone from The Untouchables -- that stern but kindly sage would have italicized the meaning of that moment (in a voice flavored with an endearing, albeit ethnically dubious, Caledonian brogue, of course):


"Barry, my boy, the key to real change and upward mobility is not to seize the earnings of the industrious and thrifty and lavish them on the corrupt and profligate. It's to let people keep what they earn and use it to make life better for themselves and their children. That's not The Chicago Way -- but it is what we used to call The American Way. Here endeth the lesson."


But, as Charles Glass documents in a terrific overview of Obama's gestational years in the womb of the Chicago Machine, the would-be world-saver was both ideologically tone-deaf to the significance of such moments, and too beholden to the crass political establishment in the Big Onion, to change his trajectory.


And now that he's president, Obama -- acting on behalf of the entrenched kleptocratic clique in control of our economy -- is seeking to consummate "redistributive change" on a national basis by making it impossible for "Sadies" anywhere in the country to save what they earn and improve their circumstances.


To understand how this works, it's useful to turn to the oeuvre of the Wayans Brothers, producers of the early 1990s sketch comedy program In Living Color -- a program entirely uninhibited by politically correct etiquette.


Perhaps by virtue of their status as fully accredited minorities, they had what Seinfeld referred to as "total joke immunity"; this permitted them to examine, often in terms that would have made Rabelais blush, the comic-rich foibles of inner-city personality types. (Granted, the Wayans Brothers also inflicted Jim Carrey on the rest of us, and there are some things that simply cannot be forgiven.)


Not all of the Wayans Brothers' targets were treated scornfully. One recurring sketch featured the Hedleys, the "hardest-working West Indian family" in the country. In this small but very energetic Jamaican household it is considered a stain on the family honor for someone to be working for fewer than a half-dozen employers. A man is judged by the number of jobs he can juggle simultaneously. Even toddlers are required to seek paying work as soon as they develop marketable motor skills.


The Hedleys' catchphrase -- which is the defining feature of recurring sketch comedy -- is: "Hey, mon'-- I gotta go to work!"


One installment find the older daughter aglow over the prospect of her date with a new beau, a wonderful man who makes more than $100,000 a year. That radiance quickly disappears however, when her prospects are occluded by parental disapproval; you see, her boyfriend is a doctor, which means that he only has one job.


At the other end of the spectrum from the eccentric but admirable Hedleys we find "Whiz" and "Ice," a pair of petty crooks from the Hip-Hop anti-culture who consider themselves entrepreneurs and wealth-building consultants.


Where the immigrant Hedleys speak with a pronounced accent but precise, intelligible diction, the native-born Whiz and Ice converse in a patois -- sub-Ebonics-level English punctuated with spastic hand gestures -- that is perhaps a step above primal grunts and simian territorial antics. And while the Hedleys are busy earning money, Whiz and Ice are constantly exploring new ways to steal it. Their catchphrase will become quite obvious anon.


In the classic sketch depicting the "Homeboy Financial Seminar," Whiz and Ice peddle their new booklet, "How to Make MO' Money, Without Using YO' Money."


"Now, you might ask, `Whose money should I use?'" says Ice as he winds up for the sales pitch. "Well, who got mo' money than they know what to do wid'?"


"Da gub-MENT!" chimes in Whiz on cue.


With the practiced confidence of people who have lived their own advice, Ice and Whiz then give step-by-step instructions on how to use the Food Stamp program to leverage a six-pack of beer that costs $3.99 ("or even less, dependin' on the security system!" Whiz points out) into a $25 profit.


"Mo' money, mo' money, MO' MONEY!" they exclaim.


They then present a few videotaped testimonials from people who have worked their program successfully -- such as Anton "Boom-Boom" Geno, who made $45,000 in three weeks (before being locked away for 5-8 years); or Luther "Bighead" Jones, who scooped up $123,000 in six months (before being shot resisting arrest).


Whiz and Ice are creatures of pure consumption; they merely take and spend. The Hedleys are a caricature of upwardly mobile immigrants; all they do is work and save.


There is nothing new in this contrast; it's as old as Aesop's parable of the grasshopper and the ants. And, as the Wayans Brothers almost certainly understood as they created the characters, the allotment of such disparate character traits has nothing to do with melanin content or ethnicity (although culture undoubtedly plays a significant role).


Where industry and time preference are concerned, the Hedleys could have been immigrants from Korea, Latin America, India, the Pale of Settlement; they could have been 19th-Century sodbusters or 21st-century information entrepreneurs.


As for Whiz and Ice -- well, they could be considered creatures from the collective Id of post-Bubble Wall Street.


The difference between the small-scale scam described in the "Homeboy Financial Seminar" and the more exotic species of fraud that prospered during the most recent Federal Reserve-engineered boom is entirely a matter of scale.


The securitized debts peddled by the likes of Goldman Sachs were a bit like a street hustler's "flash roll" -- an apparently impressive wad of cash that turns out to be a single large-denomination bill wrapped around a handful of fives and ones with a large core of blank paper sheets. The chief difference between a "flash roll" and a Collateralized Debt Obligation, for example, is that the latter is trash all the way through.


In a larger and more uncomfortable sense, however, Whiz and Ice symbolize our entire debt-based consumer economy since August 1971, when the dollar became a pure fiat currency.


America's Empire of Debt, wrote William Bonner and Addison Wiggin in the indispensable book of that title (published on the eve of the unfolding financial melt-down) is "a vainglorious system of conceit, deceit, debt, and delusion.... Americans believe they can get rich by spending someone else's money.... They believe that foreign countries actually want to be invaded and taken over. They believe they can run up debt forever, and that their debt-laden houses are as good as money in the bank."


Or, to summarize the matter in a single pithy phrase, the entire system is based on the idea of "gettin' MO' money, wid-out usin' YO money."


One would think that the bloody debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq would disabuse Americans of the notion that other countries are simply aching to be invaded and occupied by the U.S. military. In similar fashion, one would think that the deepening horrors of our debt-based financial system would cause people to repent of the delusion that one can borrow his way to prosperity.


One would think this is the case. One would be wrong.















I'm tempted to say that the third eye is for "Inflation." (Sorry.)


Witness the unedifying spectacle of Barrack Obama peddling his administration's new subsidized mortgage refinancing program (no equity required, as long as your mortgage is backed by one of those twin exemplars of fiscal rectitude, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac) with the unctuous pseudo-sincerity of a late-night infomercial pitchman.


But this is just one relatively small example of the Obama regime's grand design for recovery, which is to "rescue" the economy by confiscating -- through taxation or inflation -- all the wealth earned by the Hedleys and delivering it into the hands of the Whizzes and Ices of Wall Street.


How is this to be accomplished?


Simple:


Mo' money, mo' money, MO' MONEY! -- that is, the Federal Reserve's officially sanctioned counterfeit of the same.

How is the Zimbabwean dollar superior to our own official fiat scrip? It's a multi-colored currency, which means that it can at least serve a decorative purpose.

Since last September, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve have spent, lent, or issued loan guarantees totaling $12.98 trillion. Last year’s Gross Domestic Product was $14.2 trillion.

This means that the Treasury and Fed, in order to service their Wall Street seraglio, have siphoned away the equivalent of nearly the entire U.S. economy.

In terms individualized impact, this exercise in corporate communism will cost $42,105 for every living American. (Of course, that computation doesn't take into account the disparate impact those costs will have on the productive "Hedleys" versus the parasitical "Whizzes" and "Ices.")

The total amount diverted into the rescue effort is fourteen times the $900 billion in U.S. currency presently in circulation. Monetizing that full amount -- a likely outcome, now that the Fed is buying T-bills -- would have some, ah, interesting social consequences. As the pitiful inhabitants of Zimbabwe can testify, "mo' money" is hardly a blessing when a corrupt government simply emits an endless gusher of value-free paper scrip.

A quick note --

Versions of this document, a purported "Assessment" of "Rightwing Extremism" prepared by the "Extremism and Radicalization Branch" of the Department of Homeland Security," have been circulating in the blogosphere for the past couple of days.

I've been trying to determine whether it is an official document or a decent forgery composed by someone with a perverse sense of humor. Presently, I'm waiting -- most likely in vain -- for some people to respond to telephone inquiries regarding the document and the mysterious DHS "Extremism and Radicalization Branch."

Right now I'm inclined to treat this supposed report as a plausible fiction -- perhaps a sharply written satire.

As soon as I learn anything substantial, I'll certainly pass it along. Keep watching this space.

Second update: It Appears to be Authentic

The Washington Times this morning (April 14), in an article about the same "assessment" document, cited Homeland Security spokeswoman Sara Kuban by way of verifying its authenticity. Kuban describes it as "one in an ongoing series of assessments by the department to `facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization in the U.S."

Ah, the advantages that still accrue to the "old media": I tried at least a half-dozen different ways to solicit a comment from the Homeland Security bureaucracy, and I'm still waiting for my most recent promised call-back.

On sale now.












Dum spiro, pugno!

The Pogrom That Wasn't

[By way of preface: I'm tired, and by that I mean I am weary at the molecular level. I have no fewer than three partially completed essays -- and what promises to be a fairly huge investigative piece -- in the works, but domestic concerns have made it impossible for me to finish any of them, at least to my satisfaction.

So, for only the second time in the history of this blog -- that's 404 essays so far -- I'm going to republish a piece previously run elsewhere. By tomorrow evening -- I promise! -- this space will
be filled with a new, first-run essay. I'm also working on some YouTube projects; hopefully, we'll see the first of those in a couple of weeks.

On the subject of video -- I'm also including below a two-part video produced by a very industrious fellow named Rick, whose YouTube channel you folks really should check out. That video is an illustrated version of a commentary I did on the subject below for the old Review of the News Online program.


Five years ago the air was thick with dire warnings that the film "The Passion of the Christ" would ignite America's ambient anti-Semitism into a firestorm of persecution. The lead voice in that ensemble was, predictably, the criminally misnamed Anti-Defamation League, which performed its familiar cadenzas of outrage and alarm.


Oddly enough, however, the anticipated persecution never materialized. There were even a couple of well-publicized episodes in which skinhead-type Nazi-wannabes, after seeing the film, repudiated their lifestyles, which would mean that The Passion's impact translated into a net loss for the cause of Jew-hating.


Predictably, the ADL and its allies, after defaming more or less the entire American Christian population, never acknowledged that they were wrong.


In all candor, I've not seen The Passion. I don't agree with much of Mr. Gibson's theology, although I respect his formidable gifts as a filmmaker. From my perspective the key issue here wasn't the film itself, but rather the fashion in which cynical opportunists like Foxman exploited it as an opportunity to engender inter-communal distrust and hostility, and the role played by people of his ilk in promoting "The Fatal Embrace" -- a dependency on the "protective" power of the state, which is the true enemy of liberty, peace, prosperity, and tolerance. -- WNG]

The Pogrom That Wasn't: The Passion of The Christ, Five Years Later

"For almost 2,000 years in Western civilization, four words legitimized, rationalized, and fueled anti-Semitism: 'The Jews killed Christ,'" claimed Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in a February 6 [2004] speech in Palm Beach concerning the new film The Passion of the Christ.


The unmistakable thrust of Foxman's address was that because Christianity is innately anti-Semitic, Mel Gibson's film could activate the latent anti-Semitism the ADL insists can be found everywhere--including the United States.


"For hundreds of years those four words--acted out, spoken out, sermonized out--inspired and legitimized pogroms, inquisitions and expulsions," continued Foxman. "Many during the Holocaust who killed Jews from Monday to Friday went to church on Sunday and there was no disconnect for them, because, after all, all they were doing was killing 'Christ killers.' So for us, the possible impact of a Passion Play on the global scene with a global producer, with an icon, is not a fantasy, it's a serious anxiety. For us, it is a flashback into history."


Foxman elsewhere asserted that "Holocaust survivors ... can vividly recall their families having to hide in the basement in order to avoid the wrath of Christians emerging from Easter Sunday services."


Here Foxman ignores the well-documented fact that thousands of European Jews survived the Holocaust because Christians hid them in their basements or otherwise protected them from the Nazis. Among those thus sheltered was Foxman himself--who now besmirches pious Christians, rather than collectivist pagans, for the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews.



Foxman's complaint was echoed by countless voices in the punditocracy.


"Since medieval times, passion plays--which, like Gibson's movie, depict the last 12 hours of Christ's life--have often been openly anti-Semitic and used to justify persecution of Jews," opined the Baltimore Sun. "The Passion is hopelessly mired in anti-Semitic stereotypes," declared Entertainment Weekly. "The mere choice of title is dangerously loaded: Passion plays, a centuries-old art form, are often so liable to incite anti-Semitic anger that Catholic theologians crafted guidelines in the '80s for tonal appropriateness."


According to Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, "the crucifixion is not just a story; it is a story with its own story--a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands." Krauthammer's colleague Richard Cohen denounced Gibson's film--which is drawn largely from the Gospels--as "fascistic."


In similar fashion, the New York Daily News ranted: "Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II." Newsweek expanded the indictment from passion plays and Gibson's film to include the New Testament itself. Posing the question of whether "the Gospels themselves [are] anti-Semitic," the February 16 cover story replies: "Not in the sense the term has come to mean in the early 21st century...."



The magazine goes so far as to imply that the New Testament should carry the spiritual equivalent of the Surgeon General's warning affixed to cigarette packages: "The tragic history of the persecution of the Jewish people ... clearly shows what can go wrong when the Gospels are not read with care."


Boston Globe columnist James Carroll dispenses with such subtlety altogether, suggesting that the New Testament itself is a crime against tolerance: "Even a faithful repetition of the Gospel stories of the death of Jesus can do damage exactly because those sacred texts themselves carry the virus of Jew hatred." New York Times film critic Frank Rich, who execrates Gibson's film as a "porn movie" of the "homoerotic" variety (a description which Rich would generally offer as a compliment, judging from previous reviews), insists that "the fracas over The Passion has made me feel less secure as a Jew in America than ever before."


Strange as it may seem, Rich has it exactly right. It is not the film itself, or the Christian faith that the film reflects, but rather the orchestrated outrage over that film that may undermine relations between Christians and Jews and ultimately imperil the rights and personal security of all Americans.

ADL Smear Campaign

For roughly a year prior to the release of Gibson's film, the Anti-Defamation League waged a campaign traducing both the director and his movie as anti-Semitic. In the course of that campaign, an ADL operative purloined an early draft of the script.


On the basis of a few isolated elements of the stolen script, the ADL condemned the work in progress for displaying "numerous anti-Semitic elements" and demanded that Gibson rework his film to its satisfaction. Failing in its effort to exercise editorial control over the film's content, the ADL urged the director to add a postscript to the film that would constitute, in essence, the metaphorical "Surgeon General's warning" about the supposedly toxic effects of Christianity.[...]


Corrie ten Boom, rescuer of Jews: According to the ADL, she and the rest of her heroic Dutch family just didn't understand the "real" meaning of the New Testament.



Rather than leaving audiences to ponder the essential Christian message of redemption, the ADL's suggested coda would leave audiences pondering the supposed collective guilt of Christians for the historic persecution of Jews, up to and including the hideous crimes committed by the anti-Christian pagan Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist regime.


Gibson, to his credit, essentially ignored the ADL, which--in collaboration with the major media and other self-appointed "watchdog" groups--escalated its defamation campaign.


Numerous Jewish religious leaders and scholars who previewed the film--including Rabbi Daniel Lapin and film critic Michael Medved--hailed it as an artistic masterpiece devoid of any anti-Semitic content.


Referring primarily to the ADL, Rabbi Lapin offered the following commentary shortly after Gibson's film was released: "Those Jewish organizations that have squandered both time and money futilely protesting The Passion, ostensibly in order to prevent pogroms in Pittsburgh, can hardly be proud of their performance. They failed at everything they attempted. They were hoping to ruin Gibson rather than enrich him. They were hoping to suppress The Passion rather than promote it. Finally, they were hoping to help Jews rather than harm them. In this, they have failed miserably. By selectively unleashing their fury only on wholesome entertainment that depicts Christianity in a positive light, these critics have triggered anger, hurt, and resentment."


Rabbi Lapin, like countless other devout Jews, is a man of faith and goodwill. Thus it's not surprising that he is insufficiently cynical to understand how staining Christianity with the tar brush of anti-Semitism benefits the ADL and its agenda. In fact, sowing, "anger, hurt, and resentment" through the use of dishonest--and occasionally illegal--tactics is the ADL's stock in trade, and it has been for decades.

The ADL's Rap Sheet

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, an individual named James Mitchell Rosenberg, described by political analyst Laird Wilcox as "a career infiltrator for the Anti-Defamation League," was a fixture at Ku Klux Klan rallies in the Midwest.


For the benefit of television reporters, Rosenberg also posed as a leader of a paramilitary group called the "Christian Patriot's Defense League," which was the subject of a breathless expose entitled "Armies of the Right." He was eventually arraigned on criminal charges, which were dismissed after the intervention of Irwin Suall, his ADL supervisor.


A little more than a decade later, Roy Bullock, described by Wilcox as "a paid ADL operative and well-known figure in the San Francisco homosexual community," engaged in similar undercover work in the Bay Area, attempting to forge spurious links between ADL-designated "hate groups" and actual terrorist organizations. Bullock worked closely with Tom Gerard, an intelligence officer with the San Francisco Police Department.


According to Wilcox, Gerard "regularly took information from police files for transmittal to the ADL and in some cases to Israeli intelligence agencies, with whom the ADL works closely." Gerard avoided criminal charges by fleeing the country.


The ADL bribed its way out of trouble by offering a $75,000 donation to a San Francisco hate crimes investigation fund.


[Fifteen] years ago, the ADL released a 193-page screed entitled The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America, purporting to document that Christian conservatives pose a menace to Jews and other minorities.


Outraged by this libel, 75 prominent American Jews signed a full-page ad in the New York Times to condemn the ADL. Since Jews have often been victimized by religious bigotry, the ad pointed out, "we have a special obligation to guard against it, and all the more so, when in the case of the ADL attack on our Christian fellow citizens, it emanates from our own community."


Additionally, continued the ad, "Judaism teaches ... that we have the duty to acknowledge the good done to us. In issuing The Religious Right study, the ADL has among other things seriously violated that principle."


On March 1, just shortly after The Passion's debut, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a $10.5 million defamation judgment against the ADL arising out of a Colorado lawsuit.


William and Dorothy Quigley had filed the suit in the mid-1990s after ADL regional director Saul Rosenthal, speaking in a press conference, accused the couple of being anti-Semites.


In 1994, the ADL intervened in a pointless quarrel between the Quigleys and their Jewish neighbors, the Aronsons. Seeking to prove that the Quigleys were motivated by anti-Semitic prejudice, the ADL suggested that the Aronsons conduct an illegal wiretap of the Quigleys' phone conversations.

Another Christian who just didn't "get it," from the ADL's perspective: Father Bruno (born Henri Reynders) a Belgian Benedictine Monk, led a large and sophisticated rescue operation -- at considerable personal peril -- after being released from a POW camp in 1941. With him in the photo above are five of the hundreds of Jewish children Father Bruno and his associates protected from the Nazis.


The league then went public with its accusations against the Quigleys, who found themselves formally accused of hate crimes (a charge subsequently dropped). As a result of the ADL's actions, the Quigleys were battered with death threats and hate mail (including a package containing dog feces), and were denounced from the pulpit by their priest. The family was driven to hire bodyguards, and William Quigley--who worked in the motion-picture industry--found that his career was effectively destroyed. (This underscores the commercial and career risks encountered by Mel Gibson and his colleagues after they were targeted by the ADL.)


"We're all disappointed," commented ADL Mountain States Region director Bruce DeBoskey to the March 2 Rocky Mountain News. Pointing out that more than a dozen other "human rights" organizations had filed legal briefs in support of the ADL, DeBoskey insisted--apparently with a straight face--that "we do remain committed to our fight against hatred and racism and bigotry and extremism and anti-Semitism."

A Place of Refuge

As the Quigley case illustrates, in contemporary America it's much more dangerous to be labeled an anti-Semite than to be identified as a Jew. This certainly doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would happen in a culture primed for mass pogroms against Jews.


Nevertheless, notes historian Paul Gottfried (a Conservative Jew), the ADL and similar organizations "appeal successfully to their donor base by evoking the specter of Christian traditionalists. This is happening not in Czarist Russia but in a country founded by Protestant sectarians, who have never persecuted Jews, and the campaign of fear and loathing is being directed against enthusiastically philo-Semitic Christians."


In fact, America is unquestionably the most philo-Semitic society in the world. As Orthodox Jewish author David Klinghoffer points out: "You've heard the phrase 'anti-Semitism without Jews,' to describe the hostility to Jews felt in countries ... that don't have any Jews. In the American Jewish community, we've got anti-Semitism without anti-Semites."



In a July 15, 1994 interview with the Jerusalem Post, historian Leonard Dinnerstein, author of the book Anti-Semitism in America, observed that "anti-Semitism in the U.S. has clearly declined to an unimagined degree.... [I]t's become so minuscule as to be virtually irrelevant.... Jews are incredibly secure in the United States, and I see no reason whatsoever why that should change.... The fact is, a lot of American Jews just aren't ready to accept just how well-accepted they are in America."


Citing the ADL's own annual audits of anti-Semitic acts, Dinnerstein concluded that "anti-Semitism is just a tiny blip on the American consciousness." Yet to judge matters from the frenzied reaction The Passion provoked from many pundits, one would assume that America abounds in crypto-anti-Semites willing to stage pogroms on the smallest pretext. Such scapegoating of Christianity is not merely libelous; it is literally demented.


As Professor Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University pointed out in his 1993 study The Fatal Embrace, it is statism--not Christianity--that lies at the root of historic anti-Semitism. In previous eras, Ginsberg explains, Jews were socially marginalized people whose status led them "to seek the protection of the state.... Over the past several centuries ... Jews have played a major role in the strengthening of existing states and in efforts to supplant established regimes with new ones."


In many states, he continues, "Jews were crucial in building and staffing institutions of extraction, coercion, administration, and mobilization.... [T]hese relationships between Jews and the state have been the chief catalysts for organized anti-Semitism."


Digested into simple terms, Ginsberg's compelling thesis is that time and again, Jews have sought to build state power in order to protect themselves from persecution--only to engender the hostility of those whose prosperity and liberties suffer at the hands of the state. And time and again, the state turned its wrath on the same Jewish advisers and agents who had worked so diligently to expand its powers--often with lethal consequences for them and many innocent Jews.


Despite this utterly predictable outcome, Ginsberg observes, "Jews often continued to look to the state for protection even when it was the state itself that was the source of their problems." He cites one particularly tragic example of this "fatal embrace" at work: "[T]o the very end many German Jews could not believe that the German state would fail to protect them from the excesses of Nazi fanatics."

Avoiding the "Fatal Embrace"

As Rabbi Lapin and many other Jewish leaders have pointed out, America's Christian heritage is the single most important reason why Jews have enjoyed unparalleled acceptance and security in this country. A closely related reason is our constitutional system of limited government under law, which was designed to limit state power in a way that would prevent the dreadful consequences of the "fatal embrace" described by Ginsberg.


The ADL's campaign to execrate Mel Gibson and his film by libeling the Gospels and Christianity as being anti-Semitic is a calculated effort to undermine the goodwill of American Christians and to incite inter-communal hostility. Both Jews and non-Jews are hurt by this smear tactic. The only obvious beneficiary (besides the ADL itself, which profits handsomely from such needless rancor) will be the state--which will leave not only Jews, but all of us, in much greater peril.

"Inventing an Enemy," Pt. 1

***

"Inventing an Enemy," Pt. 2

[The foregoing essay originally appeared in the April 5, 2004 issue of The New American; Copyright 2009 by William Norman Grigg]



On sale now.












Dum spiro, pugno!

The Ballad of John Singer

***
A brief, inadequate, and highly tendentious summary of the John Singer case.
















The Singers, sans John: Vicki Singer is second from the right in the back row; below, right, the Singer farm (or, as the media put it, "compound") as it appeared in 1988.



In the village of Marion, east of Utah's celebrity-overrun Park City, can be found a 2.5-acre tract owned by the family of John Singer.


A reservoir located just south of the farm is fed by the runoff from nearby Hoyt's Peak.
Even in late summer, when the pitiless sun drives most residents of northern Utah to seek refuge in air-conditioned rooms, the pristine waters of that reservoir are bracingly cool. So it's hardly surprising that Jeff Edrington and Spencer Smith were found playing in that reservoir on a blistering day in late July 1973.



Unfortunately, neither of the young boys had told an adult where they were going. So nobody was there to help them when the raft on which they were lounging overturned, leaving them stranded in the middle of the lake. The water was easily deep enough to drown in, and the boys were too far from the shore to make it on their own.


After hearing desperate cries for help, Heidi Singer frantically sprinted home to tell her father. A few minutes later the wiry 42-year-old farmer crested a nearby hill just in time to see one of the boys lose his battle to retain buoyancy. Without breaking stride, John dove into the lake. Muscles hardened by farm work quickly carried him to the drowning child; hands strengthened by milking dairy cows grasped the boy firmly and carried him to the surface.


A few seconds later Jeff Edrington was ashore, coughing lake water from his lungs and -- despite temperatures that threatened to cross the century mark -- shivering. "Where's Spencer?" Jeff asked Heidi as her father made several more urgent attempts to find the other boy. Each dive took John a little deeper, and each time he stayed underwater a little longer, but little Spencer couldn't be found.


For nearly a half-hour John Singer kept up the search before succumbing to exhaustion. By this time, Jeff Edrington's father Val had arrived to comfort his son. With tearful gratitude Val Edrington took one of John Singer's hands in both of his and thanked him for the life of his son.



"It might as well have been two boys who drowned today if it weren't for you, John," the elder Edrington sobbed.



Five years later, the same Val Edrington who embraced John Singer and tearfully thanked him for saving the life of his son would publicly call for Singer to be murdered under the color of "law" -- for the supposed crime of protecting his own children from the state.


Just weeks before Singer rescued Edrington's son, he and his wife Vicki had removed their children from local government-run schools. The Singers were motivated primarily by religious and moral concerns; they believed that their children were threatened with both bodily and spiritual harm by a system that taught secular, collectivist principles and cultivated moral laxity.



At the time, Edrington was the superintendent of the Summit County school district. Even though homeschooling was hardly a novelty even in 1973, he was determined to compel Singer to surrender his children for state indoctrination.


When the school board met in September of that year, recall David Fleisher and David M. Freedman in Death of an American, their 1983 book about the Singer case, Edrington testified that he was reluctant "to file a complaint against the Singers in juvenile court" on account of the fact that Singer had saved his son's life.



Putting aside whatever misgivings he felt, Edrington dutifully collaborated with the school board by signing a December 6, 1973 criminal complaint alleging that John and Vickie Singer had contributed to the delinquency of three of their children "by withdrawing said minor children from school, and failing to comply with policies and standards set out for the education of said children as provided in the Utah Code."



By presuming to educate their own children as they saw fit, in their own home, the Singers were committing a crime "against the peace and dignity of the state of Utah," huffed the criminal complaint.



Perhaps, if Edrington had chosen not to sign that complaint -- if he had defended Singer as an honorable man and caring father -- Utah would have been spared what would turn into a 15-year struggle with John Singer and his family, a conflict punctuated by the needless deaths of two men, both of them fathers with children to raise. But Edrington -- like a half-dozen other officials in key positions -- believed that loyalty to the state and its positivist "laws" is the highest moral obligation.


Within that pusillanimous company, Edrington distinguished himself -- first, because of his manifest ingratitude to Singer for saving the life of his own son, and second, because of the perverse enthusiasm he would display for the use of lethal coercion against Singer for daring to defy the state.

Righteous Rebellion

By virtue of both background and character, John Singer was ill-suited for the saddle of the state. Two years after he was born in Brooklyn, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. His German-born father Hans, who had joined the National Socialist Party in 1923 (his party membership card was #4278), eagerly returned to the Fatherland in anticipation of the Aryan Millennium.


Upon turning ten, John was compelled to enlist in the Hitler Youth, and organization he quickly came to despise. His father -- over the objections of his wife, Charlotte -- also enrolled John and his brother Harald in an elite prep school run by the SS. Within a year and a half both John and Harald -- to their eternal credit -- were expelled from the SS-run school for insubordinate and "rebellious" behavior.


Unlike her husband, Charlotte was a devoutly religious woman, a convert to the Mormon faith, and she instilled in her children both a sense of traditional morality and a marrow-deep hatred for authoritarian conformity. This put the three of them immediately at odds not only with Hans, but also with the state-run Nazi school system, in which despotism and depravity were firmly welded together.

Parens patriae, as promoted in National Socialist Germany.



"A civil service act in 1937 required teachers to be `executors of the will of the party-supported state,' which they were to defend `without reservation,'" recall Fleischer and Freedman in Death of an American. "A local youth office could obtain a guardianship court order to take children away from families whose political or religious convictions were questionable, who befriended Jews, or who refused to enroll their children in the Hitler Youth. The youth office then placed the children in `politically reliable' homes. In addition, parents could be fined or imprisoned for withholding their children from participation in party youth activities, even those parents who merely objected that such activities were responsible for the high pregnancy rate among teenage girls."


Following the war, Charlotte and her sons and daughter Edeltraud found their way to Utah. John and Harald were drafted into the U.S. military, which reinforced their hatred of regimentation. Following his discharge, John found work as a television repairman, eventually opening his own business.


Although he was an active and faithful Mormon, John gravitated toward a controversial "fundamentalist" named Gus Weller, who believed that the LDS Church had compromised too much when it abandoned polygamy and jettisoned other controversial teachings and practices. Weller provided John with the tract of land on which he built his home and farm, and, eventually, his one-room schoolhouse. This is the same home that would later be referred to as the "Singer Compound" during conflicts with state authorities.


In September 1963, 32-year-old John married 20-year-old former homecoming queen Vicki Lemon. In order to exchange their vows the couple -- both of whom were of legal age -- had to flee to Elko, Nevada a few steps ahead of a posse organized by the bride's family, who considered the groom to be entirely unsuitable. The plan was to have John arrested for kidnapping, and Vicki forcibly committed to a mental hospital in Provo. The couple managed to elude the dragnet long enough to be married, and things settled down after they settled in on their homestead near Marion, Utah.


The chief reason Vicki's parents objected to the marriage was John's reputation as an "apostate." His was the hand always raised in Sunday School to challenge the prepackaged certitudes offered by the instructor.


It wasn't that Singer was an unbeliever; it was that he believed too strongly in the pure, uncut Mormonism of the pre-1890 vintage, rather than what he considered to be an inferior, attenuated version being preached by his contemporaries. (In 1978, Singer became a polygamist, taking Shirley Black as a "plural wife.")


Singer was constantly rebuked by co-religionists who often recited the familiar admonition, "When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done." Not surprisingly, given his formative experiences in Nazi Germany, Singer found that line of thought unpersuasive, and he once "had the audacity to compare the mentality of those church members who blindly follow their leaders to the obedience of the German people to Hitler during World War II," observe Fleischer and Freedman.


In 1972, John and Vicki's theological views led to their excommunication from the LDS Church. Sitting in the Church Court that handed down that sentence were the principal of the local school and several other officials who would later seek to imprison John and Vicki for "child neglect" and "contempt of court." And their status as "apostates" made it difficult to earn a living, or maintain reliable friendships: "On their shopping trips to Kamas," write Fleischman and Freedman, "John and Vicki would encounter burning stares of rage and hate from the people."

"Pressing the issue"

In February 1978, five years after Singer had begun to educate his children at home, Edrington met with a Summit County citizen's group formed to advise the school board. The protracted struggle between the Singer family and the state of Utah dominated the meeting. When one participant chided the board for pursuing the matter too zealously, Edrington replied that he intended to "press the matter to the very ultimate."


"John Singer has broken the law," declared Edrington, no doubt with Pharisaical piety oozing from every syllable, "and if pressing the issue means that John Singer will be killed, then that's the way it will be."


Keep in mind that Edrington was not referring to someone who had committed a capital crime, or any offense against persons or property. John Singer wasn't a fugitive from justice. He hadn't so much as left a parking ticket unpaid, or failed to return a book to the local public library. Singer's initial "crime" was to educate his own children in his own home, at his own expense.


But by the time Edrington publicly approved of the idea of killing John Singer, the real issue was no longer the rights of Singer or his children, but rather the injury Singer's defiance had done to the institutional vanity of Utah's judicial system.


Pursuant to an agreement extorted from them by the state, the Singers permitted their four oldest children to be tested by school district officials in October 1974 and April 1975. They also agreed to follow a homeschooling plan approved by the district. In exchange they were granted a "certificate of exemption," which was essentially a scrap of paper polluted with boilerplate language certifying that they would be permitted the "privilege" of teaching their own children.


After the Singers informed the school district that they would countenance no further interference in the upbringing of their children, they were once again accused of "criminal neglect" toward their offspring.


So acute was that "neglect" that the Singers were spending hours each day teaching those children in a schoolhouse they constructed, using books, projectors, and other equipment they had purchased at their own expense.


The pitiable Singer children were given personalized instruction by the most motivated teachers whenever any of them had difficulty with an assignment. With damnable indifference to the well-being of their heirs, the Singers taught them the value of rigorous, honest work under the open sky, imparting to them an ethic of self-reliance while the inmates of the collectivist hive were being raised as dutiful conformists and consumers.


For deflecting several efforts by the school system to seize control of his home school program, Singer had been cited for "contempt of court" -- that all-encompassing non-offense that occurs anytime somebody fails to treat a pathologically vain cross-dresser with a gavel like an vacationing Olympian deity.


Writing with reference to a familiar tactic, Joel Skousen points out: "Notice, that if you ever resist bureaucratic 'law,' you are not prosecuted for resisting an inane and unconstitutional law, but for `defying the court' or `resisting arrest.' Separating the act of resistance from the initial law which motivated the act is one of the slickest ways to bring a populace into line with bureaucratic law."

Who's the real "abuser"?

In 1978, while the State of Utah was devising plans to arrest and prosecute the Singers, Daniel Kingsley, a professor at the University of Utah, visited the Singer home school along with his wife Lynn, a licensed social worker. They had little in common philosophically or theologically with the Singers. Yet a decade earlier they had withdrawn their own children from government-run schools and educated them, along with neighbor kids, in the basement of their own home in Salt Lake City. Eventually their home school grew into a full-time private academy -- the Kingsley School -- with an enrollment of 350.


"I've never heard of any parents in Utah being hassled as badly as the Singers over this compulsory attendance issue," Lynn Kingsley remarked to a state legislator. Unlike the Singers, the Kingsleys -- most likely because of the husband's academic credentials and the wife's role as a licensed social worker -- were regarded as citizens in good standing, despite the fact that they had defied the same "compulsory attendance" law.


Judge John Farr Larson, who was in charge of the Singer case by this time, was familiar with the Kingsleys' private school and had expressed approval of it. He permitted the Kingsleys to visit the Singer home and report their findings.


"I could see that the education the Singer children are getting is not the same as they would get in public schools," Lynn Kingsley testified later. "But in some ways their education is superior.... Not one of them will ever be welfare cases when they grow up. They are learning responsibility.... I would love to have the children in my school visit that farm and learn some of the things Mr. Singer teaches his kids."


"It is a marvelous method to sit around the table with children, on a small-group basis, with a very individualized approach, and this is what the Singers do in their home school," continued Mrs. Kingsley. "To put the children back in public school at this time would be like leading lambs to slaughter."


Ah, but what about "socialization," the cardinal virtue of goverment education and its all-sufficient justification?


"The last thing the Singer children need to worry about is being social," Lynn observed. "They have more friends and relatives up there to play with than almost any group of kids I've ever known.... I wish that all of the children that come ot my school looked and acted and behaved as courteously as the Singer children. I felt very much that these children have been taught some social graces."


Judge Larson's reaction to this testimony was to order the Singers to collaborate with the Kingsleys "to establish a private school that ... meets the educational stadards of the state." He also ordered Singer to submit to arrest on contempt charges. John and Vicki were smart enough to recognize that there was a loaded gun hidden inside the bouquet offered by Larson, and refused to comply. Singer made it known that he would resist, by armed force, any effort to take him into state custody.


This prompted yet another escalation by the State of Utah in its jihad against the Singers.


In October 1978, four police officers disguised as a television reporter and camera crew ambushed Singer on his property and attempted to kidnap him. Like most of the tax-fattened specimens who follow that profession, Singer's would-be abductors were in terrible shape and thus no match for the sinewy middle-aged farmer.


After wrenching himself free, Singer pulled a thirty-eight from his waistband and ordered the thugs from his property. "Get off me, or I'll kill you!" Singer commanded. By this time Vicki and the Singer children had arrived.


Mrs. Singer caught Robert Wadman, the ringleader, by the tie, shoved a fist in his face, and informed him that she was about to "knock [his] teeth out." Several of the Singer children, propelled by righteous fury over the criminal assault on their father, launched themselves at the officers, clawing, kicking, and punching them in a frenzy of filial loyalty. Panicking and all but wetting themselves, the officers withdrew, all the while piteously pleading not to be shot.


John later confided to Vicki that his pistol wasn't loaded. Grant Larsen, one of the officers Singer fought off single-handedly, later said that the soft-spoken, mild-mannered farmer "was the toughest man I ever grabbed hold of."


As Singer's story gained national prominence, his family gained a few allies. One of them was Samuel Taylor, a Democratic state representative from Salt Lake and one of the most liberal members of the state legislature. Taylor did everything he could to persuade Judge Larson to relent.


"I have never known of any case where parents and children were as demeaned and humiliated both by the courts and by the press as in the Singer case," wrote a disgusted Rep. Taylor in a late 1978 letter to Larson. "It was the state and not the Singers who were guilty of child abuse." Taylor offered to act as a mediator between the judge and the family to prevent further violence of potential bloodshed. He suggested that the court could save face by treating John Singer's self-imposed exile on the property as a form of "home confinement," thereby obviating the perceived need to have him arrested.


Larson, however, wasn't willing to budge so much as a millimeter. In a sworn statement made during a subsequent investigation of the conflict, Judge Larson -- employing the refined, scholarly diction of his elevated calling -- referred to Taylor's efforts at mediation as "a bunch of bullshit."

Death warrant

Because he had forcibly resisted the criminal aggression of state agents, a felony bench warrant was issued for John Singer. This warrant was "legal" authorization to exercise deadly force. Armed with that license to kill, several state agencies, in cooperation with the FBI, spent the winter of 1978 devising various plans to seize Singer. Eventually a base of operations was set up at a nearby house, and snowmobiles carrying armed officers were used to keep the Singers under constant surveillance.


The plan to apprehend Singer relied on an overwhelming show of force -- "shock and awe," as it were, involving a large number of armed men. One key piece of intelligence that worked to the State's advantage dealt with Singer's well-established beliefs: It was known, as a moral certainty, that Singer would not fire the first shot.


"The key to the plan," recalled Ron Gunderson, who took part in the arrest, "was that a resonable man, when surrounded and confronted with a show of force, would submit. The problem was, John Singer was not a reasonable man."


Gunderson and nine other tax-feeders were lying in wait on the morning of January 18, 1979, when Singer was seen clearing his driveway with a snow-blower. When he spied four officers approaching him, Singer turned toward his house while reaching for his thirty-eight Colt revolver. Singer's back was turned to the assailants when he was mortally wounded by a shotgun blast.


Singer's murder appeased those running the apparatus of state coercion. Having conspired in the retalitatory murder of a dangerous political dissident, Judge Larson eventually permitted Vicki Singer to resume teaching her children as she saw fit.


"It's very ironic, to say the least ... [that] now I'm teaching my kids the same way that John and I did before he died, and I think the state knows it," Vicki commented several months after the murder. "But all they wanted to do was to show us, and show the people, that if anybody tried to come against the system, watch out because this is what can happen to you."


With the help of Gerry Spence, the Singers attempted to obtain civil redress for the murder of John. Not surprisingly, the judicial and law enforcement establishment in Utah quickly closed ranks, and the suit was quickly dismissed.


That's where matters stood until January 1988, when Addam Swapp, a vainglorious young man who marred two of Singer's daughters, set off a bomb at a local Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in what he described as a divinely ordained terrorist act intended to bring about John Singer's ressurection and the Second Coming of Christ. In the subsequent 13-day siege Swapp shot and killed a corrections officer named Fred House.


Eventually Swapp was convicted of homicide and various charges related to the bombing and sent to state prison, where he will remain until at least 2012. Vicki Singer, also arrested in the siege, was given a five-year prison sentence.


There is no justification for Swapp's terrorist act. However, to explain is not necessarily to justify. It seems reasonable to believe that the adamant refusal of Utah's "justice system" to provide redress to the Singers helped cultivate the fanaticism that sustained Swapp's deranged attempt to summon the Millennium through violence.

An "unreasonable" man

It's difficult to imagine that John Singer would have approved of Swapp's crimes. Although firmly committed to the defense of his family, even to the point of bloodshed, Singer -- whatever one thinks of his theology -- believed in and practiced the principle of non-aggression.


Singer's experiences living under the National Socialist version of the paternalistic state left him with a marrow-deep aversion to collectivism and conformity. As the product of a broken home presided over by a fanatical and abusive father, Singer came to appreciate the need for each of his children to develop as an individual, and to give them loving individual attention.


In many ways, the six-year war waged by Utah against the Singer family was the prototype for the more widely known atrocities at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Because of its roots in the subculture of Mormon fundamentalism and polygamy the Singer episode likewise foreshadowed the mass kidnapping of FLDS children by the State of Texas a year ago.



What distinguishes the Singer case from the others, however, is this: Unlike the Weavers, the Branch Davidians, or the FLDS, the Singers were being persecuted by people almost exactly like them simply because they were seen as non-conformists -- excommunicated apostates from The Church, defiantly resisting the demands of The Law.


Singer "caused [Utah's] theocratic power structure to rock and reel with national publicity that focused on the way this simply Mormon excommunicant was being treated by the Mormon moral majority," declared Gerry Spence, who represented Vicki Singer in her short-lived lawsuit against the State. The Singer family's stand had revealed the state's power structure to be "unreasonable, incompetent, unjust, and immoral. And the power structure would not tolerate it."


Accordingly, the state's enforcement apparatus, on the pretext of looking after the best interests of the Singer children, finally "subdued and conquered this renegade Mormon" by arranging to have him shot in the back.


Today, parents throughout Utah are free to school their children at home without dealing with many of the impedimentia (such as standardized testing, home inspections, or review of detailed educational records) that were thrown in the path of the Singer family by a vile and vindictive state government.



Judge Larson, who signed John Singer's death warrant, died and went to hell in 1994. His departure inspiring nauseating eulogies from the Deseret News -- Utah's largest and most reprehensible newspaper -- for being a "devoted family man" and "outstanding citizen."



As far as I can tell, Val Edrington still labors in the educational establishment, and continues to find new ways to spread needless misery. The odds are good that his son Jeff -- who would be around my age -- is still alive with a family of his own. I wonder, but not for long, if Val has told his grandchildren that he helped kill the man who saved their daddy's life.



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DARE and Back Again

Not an equal "partnership": The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) logo illustrates the conceit that the state's instruments of indoctrination (schools) and coercion (police) are "partners" with the parents in molding the character of young people.



Sitting through a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) graduation ceremony is a tedious, frustrating, and intermittently infuriating experience. It does, however, have one redeeming aspect: At its end one might feel a little better about the fate of poor little Elian Gonzalez, who was condemned to live in a totalitarian society not all that different from the one taking root here.


Elian, it will be remembered, was the Cuban youngster who was the sole survivor of a group who fled the Caribbean island gulag in 1999. He was seized at gunpoint from the Miami home of his maternal relatives in the course of an illegal and utterly gratuitous federal paramilitary raid.


The last known photographs of Elian depict him wearing the uniform of Cuba's Soviet-inspired Young Pioneers -- a white dress shirt with crimson neckerchief.


That outfit, the neckerchief in particular, symbolizes the fact that is wearer is the property of the state, the True Parent. The Cuban child belongs to his particular family only in a contingent sense; the parenthood of the state, on the other hand, is unqualified.


This is essentially the same lesson being imparted by DARE education, albeit in a more subtle fashion.


DARE likewise employs specialized clothing -- in this case only a t-shirt, but neckerchief might be added someday -- to help cultivate among children a sense of state-imparted solidarity.


Great care is also taken to encourage "DARE Kids" to act as the eyes and ears of the state in the home, willing not only to refuse drugs when offered to them but also to report drug-related misconduct therein to the police.


On more than a few occasions, DARE Kids have emulated the example of the patron "saint" of the Young Pioneers, Pavlik Morozov (depicted in the statute at right), the youngster who was feted by Stalin for informing on his own father, Trofim, for some variety of anti-Soviet behavior.


Pavlik's contemporary American disciples have been known to rummage through their parents' liquor cabinets and other personal effects in search of various mood-altering substances not presently sanctioned by the State.


DARE was created in 1983 as the brainchild of former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Daryl Gates, whose legacy is -- to say no more -- a troubled one. Appropriately, it was also Gates who, fifteen years prior to DARE's advent, created the first SWAT team.


To be fair, Gates envisioned SWAT as a special-function civilian police unit for use in hostage rescues, bank robberies, and other exceptional circumstances. It's doubtful that he intended for SWAT units to be the hyper-trophied, unabashedly militarized entities they have become.


It's similarly doubtful that Gates thought SWAT units would be tasked with routine police work, deployed as occupation forces, or dispatched for the purpose of intimidating the public -- all of which are now routine uses of SWAT teams across the country.


Three years after Gates devised the SWAT template, the Nixon administration -- for reasons of purely cynical partisan politics -- formally inaugurated the "war on drugs" (which had been under way, in one form or another, since 1909). This domestic war offered a ready-made rationale for police departments to assemble SWAT and tactical teams, and Washington opened the subsidy spigots to fund the militarization of local law enforcement.


During the Reagan administration, exceptions were carved out of the Posse Comitatus statute to permit the Pentagon to train and equip SWAT teams; the military was also given limited permission to carry out domestic counter-drug missions directly.


This co-mingling of the military and law enforcement accelerated during the Clinton years, particularly after Attorney General Janet Reno inaugurated the Pentagon's Law Enforcement Support Organization (LESO) in 1995. By the end of the 20th Century, military raids for the purpose of narcotics enforcement had become commonplace.


When the home he was living in was invaded in the pre-dawn darkness by snarling, foul-mouthed stormtroopers bearing automatic weapons, Elian Gonzalez experienced something many other American children have had to endure. I've often wondered if the unspoken purpose of that completely unwarranted act of state violence was to terrorize Elian into losing his taste for freedom, or whatever inadequate substitute America presently offers. No other initiative -- not even the "war on terror" -- has done more to abet the militarization of law enforcement than the "war on drugs."


The target of any domestic "war" is individual liberty, and the DARE program serves as a form of crypto-conscription. It is intended to turn impressionable children into little footsoldiers on behalf of the state's latest campaign against liberty, whatever form that campaign might take. Militarism permeated the proceedings at the March 30 DARE graduation at Payette High School.


The opening flag ceremony included not only the Stars & Stripes, but also the official institutional banners of all five armed services, each of which was the subject of a lengthy and pious eulogy. No overt explanation was given as to why the military banners were displayed at a counter-narcotics event; none was really necessary -- this is a "war," after all.


Roughly 120 fifth-grade students had been dragooned into taking DARE and attending the ceremony. Awards and prizes of every conceivable kind were handed out in such volume that one suspected the event was modeled after the Do-do's "Caucus-Race" from Alice in Wonderland, in which everyone wins and everyone gets a prize.


Four students were singled out to read brief essays in praise of DARE's transcendent goals and the supernal wisdom displayed by its creators and facilitators, each of which ended with a pledge to remain "drug and violence free."

Property of the State: Soviet Young Pioneers, as depicted in a 1936 propaganda poster (left), and undergoing instruction in more recent decades (below, left). Vietnamese Young Pioneers parade in their regime's version of the organization's uniform (below, right).




This prompted me to wonder what would happen if a "DARE kid" were to use the assertiveness tools taught by the program to resist a school-mandated ritalin prescription: "No! I won't take that reliably lethal, over-prescribed Schedule II narcotic! I'm a DARE kid! I took a pledge to be drug-free!"


Color me incurably cynical, but I doubt school officials would commend such a child for his strength of character as they had him dragged bodily to the nearest government-sanctioned narcotics distribution point.


Likewise, it's doubtful that, after military conscription is re-imposed a few years hence, DARE kids will be permitted an exemption on the grounds of their sacred pledge to be "violence-free." The unspoken but obvious codicil to that pledge, of course, is that kids will eschew all drugs save those the government forces on them, and will abstain from all violence except that authorized by and serving the interests of the state.


I'll wager that many of the plots in the imperial graveyard in Virginia are filled with the mortal remains of "DARE kids" whose lives were squandered in carrying out some exercise of criminal violence on behalf of the state.


Although it pays frequent lip service to the importance of families and others in a child's "support system," DARE unflinchingly promotes the primacy of the state as moral tutor. This was made clear, in ironic fashion, in the keynote address at the Payette DARE graduation ceremony. The address -- an extended parable involving the contrasting fates of two girls, Tracey and Brianna -- was delivered by Larry McGhee, Idaho state coordinator for the DARE program.


McGhee is also a high-ranking official at the Idaho Police Officer Standards and Training academy and a 30-year law enforcement veteran. Tracey, McGhee told the audience, was a girl from a very good family, but "she didn't have the DARE program." So, after a promising start, Tracey succumbed to the apparently irresistible allure of drugs. She found herself surrounded by socially marginal friends who also took drugs.


Tracey became addicted to methamphetamine. Her grades plummeted. She finished high school, but dropped out of college. She had three children by three different men, none of whom she married.


Brianna, on the other hand, came from a troubled home with little money and few prospects for improving their circumstances. She had no father in the home. But -- cue trumpets and hosannas -- she had the DARE program, that glittering diadem of civic virtue.


Under the kind and thoughtful ministrations of the state's counter-narcotics priesthood, Brianna overcame her unfortunate family circumstances. She's 17 now, excelling in her classes and surrounded by clean-scrubbed, photogenic friends. Her prospects are blindingly bright (well, as bright as can be expected as our nation succumbs to a depression).


At this point, astute listeners were expecting a twist ending, and McGhee eagerly provided it. You see, Brianna's mother is a drug addict ... none other than Tracey! And, McGhee continued, adding a pike to his twist, Tracey is his own 37-year-old daughter.


These cascading daytime talk show-style disclosures provoked a pavlovian gasp from the audience, most of which appeared to miss the ironic implications of McGhee's story. Sure, they caught the meaning McGhee meant to impart: If this can happen to a 30-year veteran police officer -- why, the state coordinator for DARE himself! -- what family could possibly be immune to the scourge of drug addiction? How could we possibly survive without the inspired guidance and direction we get from DARE, oh blessed be the name of that program and hallowed be the hands that created it!


I earnestly hope that at least a few others in the audience entertained some variation of the thought that came immediately to my mind: Why on earth should I entrust the moral and character education of my children to a program presided over by someone who, by his own public admission, experienced such a tragic failure in teaching suitable moral lessons to his eldest daughter?


Mr. McGhee, like the others involved in the local DARE campaign, seems like a decent and earnest man whose philosophical compass has been skewed by the state's malevolent magnetic field. Like other parents with demanding careers, he must have found it increasingly difficult to make adequate time to help his daughter, giving her gentle guidance where possible, and stern correction where necessary.


No government program can serve as a suitable substitute for parental involvement in moral education of the young. DARE actually undermines that involvement by cultivating unhealthy dependence on the state and an even unhealthier appetite among students for social conformity (and the inevitable hypocrisy regarding minor and temporary indulgence that flourishes wherever prohibition prevails).


Most importantly, DARE has no documentable positive impact on rates of drug use and addiction.


A study carried out a decade ago by the University of Kentucky found that there was little if any measurable difference between "DARE kids" and those fortunate enough to avoid the program where the use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and narcotics is concerned. Another mid-1990s longitudinal study involving a random selection of 23-schools using the 16-week DARE program produced exactly the same results.


DARE thus has to be considered a very costly social placebo, or perhaps even the equivalent of a narcotic intended to anesthetize the public regarding the violent, subversive, hugely expensive and pointless official fraud called the war on drugs. That alone would be sufficient reason to do away with the program. But as noted earlier, DARE is also used to propagate immensely harmful statist attitudes among the young. The whole thing is also unbearably tacky.


Why is it that events like the DARE graduation inevitably involve some hideous anthem sung by listless, defeated schoolchildren? A few years ago, in what must rank as one of the most nauseating incidents of public child abuse on record, the Bush administration assembled a group of "Katrina Kids" to serenade Laura Bush with a bizarre ditty set to the tune of "Hey, Look Me Over":


Our country's stood beside us
People have sent us aid.
Katrina could not stop us, our hopes will never fade.
Congress, Bush and FEMA, People across our land,
Together have come to rebuild us, and we join them, hand in hand!



This had to be the most rousing public performance since the Chinese Cultural Revolution, during which "Mao's Kids" would regularly perform such crowd favorites as "Happy, Happy is He Who Pulls The Night-Soil Cart."


H-Dog, RIP: The late Herbert Kornfeld, Accounts Receivable Manager at Mid-West Office Supply, gritty voice of urban culture for The Onion, composer of the DARE anthem.


At what was supposed to be the similarly rousing climax of the DARE graduation, the kids were divided into two groups to perform an entirely execrable, and nearly interminable, DARE anthem.

The number was intended to sound at once contemporary and resolute, but it in fact sounded like something composed on a Wal-Mart quality Casio keyboard by a white accountant with delusions of street cred.


My oldest son, 11-year-old William Wallace, was among the primary victims of this year's DARE graduation. For reasons I've described earlier, we had to quit home-schooling our three oldest children, which was decidedly not our idea. Thus poor William had to spend four months enduring a weekly statist harangue courtesy of DARE.


Fortunately, William is a brilliant and strong-willed individual, and I've done my best to cultivate within him a proper disrespect for the institutionalized affliction called "government."


Here's a sample dialogue:

William: "Dad, the government --"
Dad: "William, how many times do I have to tell you that I won't tolerate such language in our home? Say `those malignant bastards' instead."
William (sheepishly): "OK, Dad. I'm sorry."


As the geologic era-length DARE graduation ceremony ground to a close, William's countenance visibly brightened. As his classmates dutifully recited the lyrics of the DARE anthem, William stood in silence.


As the number neared its merciful end, amid the visible disapproval of the other graduates, William brazenly removed the DARE t-shirt that to him symbolized submission to an evil, hypocritical system. He yanked off that shirt with the same triumphant defiance displayed by Captain Kirk in "The Gamesters of Triskelion" as he tore the hated "collar of obedience" from his neck.


I've never been prouder of my son.


Video Extra


Here's a preview of DARE graduation ceremonies in Obama-era America, circa 2012:








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