B. U. G. S.

When I was a teenager I loved to read Eric Hoffer. Hoffer did heavy work until he was sixty-five, and his mentality was a lot like mine. To the worshippers of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky who never did a day’s work in their lives, Hoffer was poison.

Hoffer wrote his first book when he was 65. He wrote short books of aphorisms.

One of the points he made that he and I and practicallly nobody else at the time understood was about the “European” mind. He said the Kennedys were Europeans, not Americans. As I say, this was totally incomprehensible to most people at the time, but today we call it the “red” states versus the “blue” states.

It is hard for us today to understand a time when the idea of “Political Correctnes” was unheard of. Hoffer took it for granted that others would see hwat he meant when he said that New Englanders, especially the Irish Catholic Kennedys trying to fit into New England, those most desperately Yankee of the Yankees, were in the same category as pro-Communist European “intellectuals” and American college graduates who were trying desperately to be sophisiticated like hteir professors.

To Hoffer New York City radical chic fitted in with the New England mentality and European mentality. But the college-degree Boston Irish who desperately tried to prove they were good Harvard New Englanders were pathetically anxious to show that they had not the trace of “Americanism” in them. I knew that because I had seen the endless parade of equally pathetic Southerners with college degrees who were on generation away from white trash. Nobody tried a obviously and as desperately to prove that they were True Harvard Yankees than the turncoat Southerners.

I mean DESPERATELY.

No one is as pathetically provincial as an Irish Catholic or a turncoat Souther who is trying to remove any suspicion that he is Irish or Southern. They gave a whole new meaning to the word provincial. That is why Joe ORorke and I have a little conspiracy going. We have a common remembrance of the nausea we felt when we listened to Irish and Southerners, people with healthy instincts, when they went bawling over to the other side.

A straight New England Harvard type is silly. European Intellectuals were silly. But the reverse provincials hit you right in your gut. God, they are PATHETIC! And Joe is sitting there thinking, “Whitaker, sic the bastards!”

But let me return to the European/ Harvard mentality that Irish/ Southern turncoats worship. An “intellectual” reading Hoffer would not would not have understoodthe connection between the blue states and the “European” mindset Hoffer was talking about in 1960. Political Correctness had never been hear of. Blue states and red states were an idea that would first appear a generation later. Even today the concept is hard to understand because it is so simple.

Around 1970 I was in Austria talking to a couple of students at the University of Vienna. That was back when I was still right in the middle of my foriegn languages. I knew how to convince people in German, Spanish, Shona and even clicky-click Xhosa that I was fluent in their tongue. A student at the University of Vienna learned English, but he conversation was in German, because they were convinced I spoke it better than they spoke English.

The reason I make such a point of this language business is we were speaking in German, they took it for granted that I was fluent in German, but they were laughing at me because I was so provincial. I was not offended that they assumed that a former professor who was talknig to them in German was a provincial. Let me repeat that I had been reading about the European mind ten years before in Eric Hoffer. It never occurred to them to consider why I was in Vienna at that time. I had an excellent excuse,and Europeans are nothing if not superficial.

So there I sat, trying to explain that Communists were not nice people.

Austria is the same size as the state of South Carolina. Vienna is in the far eastern part of Austria. They considered my attitude towards Communists to be naive. I pointed out what directly NORTH of us was the Czechoslav border. I did NOT point out that I had some experience with that border of the People” Peace Loving People’s Progressive Republics. I said they were bad because they shot people who tried to escape. I could NOT point out that I KNEW people who were trying to escape.

But to an American the logic was pretty obvious. To reapeat, Austria is the same size as South Carolina. If I were sitting in South Caroline with a border to the direct NORTH of me where people were being shot down for trying to get out of a society, It would never evenoccur to me that that society was just plain evil. In order to understand why this idea was laughable to a good European requires that you understand their mindset. To these sophisticated students, I was a typical American who said, “Them shoot people who try to get out. Them BAD!” To a good European, my mentality was an apish grunt.

To the High Priests of Israel, when Jesus said to treat thy neighbor as thyself, it was an apish grunt. God, they said, was worried about how you observed the Sabbath, what foods you ate. First you fulfilled the Law, and if you had any time left, you could be nice to people too. But heaven was for those who bserved the Law, and if people got trampled in the process, that was a price a person who was truly literate had to take for granted.

So now we get to exactly what Hoffer and I meant when we talked about the European mind. A European considers it utterly childish to be obsessed with what an ideology does to human beings. For a true Europran/Harvard, New York City/Southern-Irishs turncoat type, it is, to repeat, literally APISH to concentrate on the sort of Good nad Evil thoughts that were in my mind. Yes, I had seen the results of guerrillas of the Peoples Progressive Peace Loving Republics, supported by the World Councile of Churches, slowly hacking the arms of blacks in the kraals off, hour after hour. It was bad, but my reaction was unsophisticated. My reaction was actually FUNNY, it was so childish.

A European cannot see evil as evil if you talk about it enough. Hitler was evil because he did bad things inthe name of the wrong ideas. Che Guevera was a hero because he left a lot of writing explaining his actions in terms that are fashionable to radical chic. So a picture of a hater and torturer like Che Guevara on your all shows your idealism and a picture of Hitler is evil.

To repeat, to the Europeans we saved from Communism the red state type American who never gave up the idea that Communism was just plain BAD was the reaction of a subhuman. But if they had been left to the mercy of the New Englanders they worship, like hte Kennedys, they woul dhave had the kind of first-hand experience with those Idealists that converted Solzhenisyn from a worshipper of Lenin to someone who never understood why everybody couldn’t see he was evil incarnate.

And they are right about my lack of sophistication in the matter. My big regret is that Europeans and New Englanders never got to experience nose-to-nose the evil they explained away. I am genuinely sorry we saved them. To be a good anti-Communist you have to be like William Buckley. Buckley is a Catholic who was raised in the South. By hwat he considers a fortunate coincidence, he was born in New York City, but his parents were total Southerners. Whatis worse,they were CATHOLICS. When Buckley wrote his first big book, “God and Man at Yale” he was justifying his being a Catholic, and he had been stung by all those people he looked up to calling him a Southerner.

The reason Buckley is the ideal respectable conservative is precisely because he has always been so desperate to be accepted by Yankees. He can always forgive leftists, he can admire leftists. But he is the first to condemn heretics on the right and to lead the lynch mob against them I am nothing like that. A European/Harvard-type, etc. praising me would embarrass me enormously. Every time somebody who supported civil rights “before it got out of hand” gets mugged or crippled it makes me HAPPY. I LOVE to hear about blue staters getting robbed and beaten. I LOVE to see the workers whose unions supported Social Progress getting their jobs taken away by affirmative action.

Unlike a Christian, I would not want anyone sent to an eternal Hell. But I do share their delight in those who consider the Golden Rule childisha nd apish getting what they deserve, what they ASKED for, over and over and over.

There are those who believed that is you have the right Book, you can justify any cruelty. I saw a world full of people who belived that if you wrote a book your evil was not evil. I do not have the vengefulness of true “Christian,” but I have paid the price and I have the right to enoy the payback that is going on.