"Is
it time for civil disobedience? Charles Murray says yes!" So begins Jonah Goldberg's interview of Murray, whose
new book about bureaucracy attempts to give a modish civil-rights frisson to the fight against our fascist government's onerous regulations on drinking water, workplace hazards, and other things that should be left to the wisdom of capital. It's in the form of an American Enterprise Institute
video, alas, but I have nutshelled it for you:
Goldberg, who increasing resembles
Sig Ruman, says he'll start with the riots in Baltimore, which he describes as Murray's
"wheelhouse"; as Murray is best known as the author of a book claiming to scientifically prove that
black people are stupid, you can imagine the gooseflesh among the brethren
in attendance. Goldberg's got the
fever and tries to insert as a topic of conversation the alleged "debate
about whether or not it's racist to call people thugs" -- though the
closed caption guy has other ideas:
At
first it seems as if Murray will oblige. "I'm old enough to remember what
Watts was like," he says, and adds that he acknowledged at the time "there was something really different about inner city
neighborhoods," which shows just how far he was willing to go for Those
People, but now after all the years you have the "same litany of
complaints" despite "overwhelmingly Democratic control implementing Democratic solutions," i.e., using whatever money is left over after
the city or state has delivered all its subsidized stadiums, office parks, and
other emoluments for the deserving rich to build an occasional playground or put another bench in the courthouse/
cash extraction center. And now, says an indignant Murray,
"I'm supposed to be moved when President Obama says 'we know how to cure
this if only we had the will'?" By God, he acknowledged something really different about Watts, but a man can only do so much!
Goldberg informs Murray that "I monitor a lot of
mainstream media," aka "enemy broadcasting," and he has seen
such hard leftists as Joe Scarborough citing the Kerner Commission, as if race
had anything to do with it, which Goldberg attributes to a "lack of
self-awareness" -- that
is, "they all appreciate the irony but they don't appreciate the depth of
the irony," which is that black people were happy under Giuliani, or at least terrified into silence. "You have solutions that are tried to no effect," sighs Murray,
but "cold-blooded, hard-headed evaluation" shows there's "no
effect" cuz look, a riot.
At
this point someone must have held up a sign saying PIMP BOOK ABOUT BUREAUCRACY
because Goldberg praises Murray for his assertion that "complexity from
the federal government always backfires." "Complexity has a whole
bunch of different aspects," Murray charitably concedes. Then he gets to his signal example of intolerable bureaucracy, and if you guessed
"military" or "housing court" you must be new around here.
"Teaching
kids is a pretty simple thing," says Murray, but teachers for some reason
want to keep disruptive children in their classrooms. No citation, but Murray assures us there are "six different school of education
theories" about "why you should leave that chaotic child in the
classroom." Plus even if you get these monster children out, there are
"25 pages of regulations" about how to get them
out, not like back when Old Man Murray was a boy and you just threw them out a
window. It's about "complexity of rules... a rule for everything"
-- why, Murray chortles, "I bet there's a long list of guidelines about how much physical contact you are allowed in getting that kid out
of the classroom, and if you violate any of those you got a problem." (In their Idaho Barcaloungers, his audience mistily dreams of dishing out some physical contact to young troublemakers.)
Goldberg offers that public schools are "a
reward for the guild and less about students." Murray generously allows
that for teachers "there's always an internal rationalization for doing
what you're doing," but -- look out, "what I'm about to say is not data
driven about their feelings" -- "what it looks like is people
making a pretty good salary relative to what they could make in the private
sector," that magical place where PhDs are forced to work at Starbucks and millionaires only
break a sweat during squash or rough sex; and not only that, these overpaid
child-minders have "pretty good job security" (but not for long under
President Walker!). Oddly, despite all these unfair advantages, teachers are also "demoralized" and "cynical," not because they're trying to
educate children in a country that spits on knowledge and prizes conformity but
because, well, aren't villains always miserable in spite of their ill-gotten
gains? Murray even imagines an interior monologue for these demoralized
public-sector tycoons ("I
have the ability to make trouble for you..."). Ugh, teachers, why were we
ever nice to them?
Someone
hits Goldberg with a spitball, signalling him to announce that while Murray's book is at
odds with "the intellectual Zeitgeist," normal hard-working Americans
sit on girders eating sandwiches out of metal lunch pails and extol his wisdom.
Then Goldberg suddenly claims that there is some overlap between the Tea Party and Elizabeth Warren, and offers
to "characterize" Warren's point of view, which he does thus: the
"bureaucrats and the lawyers and the politicians" are "the
people who are trying to help" while the real culprits are "the one
percent and the billionaires and Wall Street and the fat cats" who are
"pulling all the strings." To be fair, as he said this Goldberg did not roll his eyes
and speak in a grating falsetto.
You
can guess what
Fishtown Murray thinks of that! He allows there's a "nugget of
truth" in Fake Elizabeth Warren's argument, in that the "big banks and
big corporations are in bed with the government," case in point
Dodd-Frank (which, in real life, every leftist from here to the Finland Station wants
replaced with good ol' Glass-Steagall if not tumbrels and guillotines). The real problem is that corporations are behaving wrongly "with the help
of government," whereas on their own they're great, giving us proles
"ever more reliable cars, ever more powerful computers," and
"Exxon cannot come to my door and say fill up your tank with super or
you're going to jail." (No, says Goldberg -- that's "the Obamacare
model.") In the end, Murray claims he has "as many complaints about
the way capitalism is practiced as Elizabeth Warren does," but this thing
you lefties think is capitalism isn't really capitalism, it's a
"perversion of what capitalism ought to be," and it's the
government's fault. Goldberg, caught up in the intellectual fervor, adds his own gloss on a famous
Adam Smith quote: two tradesmen,
or a multitude of them, "can't collude against the customer very long
without the government helping [them]." Look at the ethical utopia that
was the Gilded Age!
Then
it's time for Goldberg to ask Murray if he's an optimist or a pessimist. Had he
any guts, Murray would have said that since he'd been successfully peddling this hooey for
decades and there's no reason why the suckers shouldn't buy this latest bunch of it, of course he's an optimist. But Murray's a salesman to the end, and so tells the
punters that two hundred years from now "we're probably going to be
way wealthier than we are now," allowing his audience to believe that
"we" means them, too, and not just a tiny sliver of neo-feudal
overlords including Charles Murray IV.
Finally
Goldberg has to deliver on the opening pitch, and tells us the book encourages
"civil disobedience," though of course it's not the kind with
"sit-ins and lunch counters" -- he and Murray share a laugh over
that: Imagine us at lunch counters, like some low-IQ you-know-whats! You can
read about this in Murray's WSJ essay, but basically, if all of us few remaining middle-class
white people get together and don't fill out form 47-B, we can take this
motherfucker down! Murray explains this in terms honkies can understand: that is, with speeding tickets and NBA officiating as examples. Then another shared laugh about
putting body cameras on bureaucrats -- ha ha, again with the you-know-whats! -- and we're out. Next week: The people united will never be forced to provide wheelchair access!
