B. U. G. S.

Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species and then held it back from publication. He only published it in 1859 because he had to.

He had to because someone else was aboout to publish a book with same ideas.

It is often said that Origin of Species changed the world.

That is not true. If Origin of Species had not been published in 1859 another book saying the same thing would have been published in 1860.

We very often hear of inventors and writers fighting over which one had prior claim to their great contribution. And all of history keeps talking about whoever won the copyright or patent fight as being the one who changed history.

None of which is true.

So who REALLY had the power? Who REALLY changed the world?

There were some really embarrasing factual errors my A Plague on Both Your Houses, 1976. But not one reviewer, however hostile even mentioned a single one of them.

As Jeffrey Hart said in his review of Plague for National Review, subtlety entitled, “Read This One!”:

“The sheer intellectual pleasure of this book is Whitaker’s corruscating insights.”

It was one idea after another, a tying together of what everybody knew but nobody had THOUGHT about.

It was a point of view.

One thing everybody agreed on: If I had not written Plague absolutely nobody else would ever have written it.

In fact, there have been books written about almost every page in Plague.

None of them mention Plague and I doubt the writers knew where their ideas came from.

The month Plague came out Chris Matthews, chief aide to Speaker Tip O’Neale (?), made a bet with a chief Republicans aide which got into the Washington Post. Said Republican knew about my book. He told Matthews that the budget for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was bigger thant he budget for the Department of Defense.

This bet occurred a month after my book was published. This bet was between two people who had been WRITING the Federal budget for years.

It turned out that Chris was wrong but he welched on the bet. That was the big news.

The big news was NOT that the world had been informed for the first time by my book that what I called “the education-welfare establishment” had, at long last, been discovered to be a bigger industry than defense.

In the comments on the 1976 convention, when the book had come out, cosnervatives for the first time started counting the education-welfare interest groups who were there. They talked about the MONEY the National Education Associated had tied up in liberalism.

No one had ever mentioned this before.

And remember, Hart talked about “corruscating” insights. This was just one of them.

There is a nice, convenient dead-end here into which some of Bob’s Blog readers have settled into:

Is Bob bragging?

I don’t mind bragging, but it is important that in this case I am not. If I tended to brag I would spent a lot of time reminding writers of where their ideas came from.

Get off my personality and concentrate on something IMPORTANT:

I am telling you about POWER.

I simply cannot tell you about what I do unless I explain to you that what I do WORKS.

“Bob is bragging” in this context is every bit as important as, “Bob doesn’t like liver.”

Get with the program, gang!

The only question is whether what I do WORKS and how you can USE it.

We are trying to change the WORLD, not evaluate Bob.