Flashman, Ron Paul, James Kirchick—And Liberty

[See also Flashman and the Politically Correct, by James Fulford]

An elderly character in one of Barbara Pym's novels grumbles, in the presence of some youngsters, about the awfulness of the pop music they are listening to. One of the youngsters turns on her rather nastily: "Of course you don't like it. It's not for you. Nothing's for you any more."

This came to mind while I was reading the "last testament" of the writer George MacDonald Fraser, who died January 2. Fraser was 82 when he died, and quite out of tune with the Britain where he had been born and spent most of his life. Fraser wrote a great many books, both fiction and nonfiction, but he is best remembered for the Flashman series of comic-historical novels.

The "testament"—you can read it here—is in fact a curmudgeon's rant, sputtering angrily against political correctness, Dianafication (that's the British word for "Oprahfication"), the collapse of standards, "the stifling tyranny of a liberal establishment, determined to impose its views", and political parties ("inventions of the devil") etc.

(Amusing to see Fraser say that "My favorite prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not because he was on the Right, but because he spent a year in office without, on his own admission, doing a damned thing." The U.S.A. has been blessed with a number of Presidents who likewise clove to the wu wei principle. We had, for example, Ronald Reagan, inspiration for the quip that saying "I have slept with the President" meant you had attended cabinet meetings. We also had Calvin Coolidge, of whom Will Rogers said: "He didn't do anything, but that's what the people wanted done." Ron Paul would be another in this illustrious line of presidential snoozers, if we can somehow get him elected. All these men know/knew, of course, that there are times when it is necessary for the Executive to act. It is only that they set the word "necessary" behind a high bar.)

Naturally I read Fraser's rant with great enjoyment. I did wonder at first, though, if Fraser hadn't perhaps over-egged the pudding. Take this passage, for example:

"[The present generation] regard themselves as a completely liberated society when in fact they are less free than any generation since the Middle Ages. Indeed, there may never have been such an enslaved generation, in thrall to hang-ups, taboos, restrictions and oppressions unknown to their ancestors … We were freer by far 50 years ago—yes, even with conscription, censorship, direction of labor, rationing, and shortages of everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment. We still had liberty beyond modern understanding because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied to the youth of today. We could say what we liked; they can't. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of special-interest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have. We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed PC to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.

Is that actually all true? Liberty-wise, surely not having conscription and censorship beats having them.

Sure, you can play some libertarian games here. How much of my time is the government "conscripting," by way of income taxes, to support the current non-conscript, military establishment…etc., etc. I still think that today we come out ahead on these points.

Let's grant Fraser some poetic license, though, and ask: Are we ahead net-net on liberty over our fathers and grandfathers?

My mulling over the "testament" had just about reached that point when I saw Mark Steyn's post on The Corner, linking to the videos Ezra Levant has been posting, of his (Ezra's) interrogations by Canada's totalitarian "Human Rights Commission." Levant has been dragged before this horrible "Commission" for having published the Danish cartoons mocking Mohammed in the Western Standard, a paper he edited, two years ago. The bureaucrat Levant is confronting across the interrogation table is particularly keen to probe Levant's intentions. She is, in other words, hunting for Thoughtcrime. Reader, you should watch those videos.

Fraser was right. Anglo-American civilization has drifted into an era of Human Rights Commissions, at which whining troublemakers with hurt feelings can enlist government power to punish and silence the hurter. Canada, as Ezra Levant's videos show, is far gone into the darkness. Britain is close behind. You can be arrested, brought before a court, and fined (though not yet, I think, imprisoned) in Britain for saying out loud, in a public place, that you find homosexuality, or Islam, objectionable. (If you are a Muslim who finds homosexuality objectionable, or vice versa, things get knotty. I refer readers to the works of Mark Steyn for elucidation.)

The U.S.A. is a few steps behind on the road to prosecutions for Thoughtcrime, but plainly heading in the same direction. Fraser was right.

You might quibble with his details, but Fraser was right that there has been a mass change of heart, a cratering of the collective will. When, back in 1957, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge scandalized polite opinion in Britain (and in Canada too) by writing an article that mocked the Royal Family—calling them "a sort of substitute or ersatz religion "—he was fired from the BBC, lost his newspaper-column contracts, and was shunned in the street by friends.

However, nobody said, nor even thought, that he should be required to explain himself to government bureaucrats for all the hurt feelings he had caused. That kind of thought was not thinkable fifty years ago. It is all too thinkable now.

It's hard to be cheerful about the prospects. I deplore all the things Fraser deplored, but with the awareness, which I suppose he too probably had, that he was railing against the elements, like poor mad King Lear—that all his anger, all his denunciations, would not make a bit of difference.

The things that Fraser hated, and that I hate—the smug moralistic conformism of Political Correctness, the prissy horrified shrieking at commonplace observations and plain facts, the deception and (far worse) self-deception about human nature and human differences, the groveling and self-abasement before inferior civilizations, all the weasely lies and hypocrisy and preening moral vanity of the PC-niks, all the bullying and witch-hunting and anathematizing, all the gas and the crap and the cant, all the terror of everyday reality, and the yearning to hide from it behind a thick, warm, soft comforter of wishful thinking—all those things are, alas, mighty in the world, and will not be dented by Fraser's vituperation, much less by mine.

That he and I detest them is of no importance. They are not for us. Nothing's for us any more.

Once you have passed fifty, it gets harder and harder not to notice that you are being left behind. Styles and manners change, of course: that you can cope with, if you are willing to put forth a little effort. Thinking changes too, though, and for that there's no coping.

You can change the outer man, just as you can buff up at the gym, if you follow a few sensible precautions. The inner man, though, is fixed by middle age (if not much earlier). As you lip-sync your way through the new manners, the new fashions, the new cant, the inner man will be whispering inside your head, louder and louder as the years go by: This is all so bogus! These kids don't know squat!

You may drop the facade at last and just let the inner man speak out, succumbing to "Elderly Tourette's Syndrome," saying things that can't be said any more (but which you know to be true, and which you further suspect that the canters also, at some subliminal level, know to be true), scandalizing and horrifying all the young fools within earshot.

You might even—I've some way to go yet, I'm glad to say, so this is hearsay testimony from an ETS-afflicted geezer known to me—you may even find that you have righteous fun doing so, though you get invited into polite society less and less.

Hard on the heels of George MacDonald Fraser's death and the publication of his "last testament," came the flap over newsletters that Ron Paul's people had put out, under his name, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. James Kirchick, [send him mail] a writer for The New Republic, had been reading back copies of the newsletters, and swooning at the horrors therein. He invited us to swoon with him at sentiments like: