A buddy of mine in the Reagan Administration was an Irishman from Philadelphia. I had been a professor and had grown out of it and he had a PhD and had grown out of it. By Reagan’s time we were a couple of political pros, as Southerners and Irishmen are in DC, crying together over a party of Yankees trying to get along in a party of Yankees who were lost in real politics.

I should have said WASPs, and you would have understood how helpless Republicans were. But Michael Novak — not Robert — popularized the use of the term WASP. I had lunch with him once and pointed out that Southerners were overwhelmingly WASP but they shared every sane characteristic of the Unmeltable Ethnics he was contrasting to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. What he MEANT by WASPs, in plain English, was YANKEES. He wasn’t being truthful.

He agreed, but Michael Novak is a theologian, so it didn’t bother him in the slightest. All professional theologians are sociopaths.

Anyway, my Philadelphia Irish buddy and I were talking and I made a Proterstant-Catholic joke. He said, “Why is it that every time a protestant makes a Catholic-Protestant joke, the Catholics always comes out ahead?”

I was impressed. He was saying that only Jews and jigs and spics and so forth cannot listen to a joke unless their guy wins over the white guy. All dumb people are blond.

Which, as my buddy damned well knew, made the guy who is touchy a bit like a … well, you know.

BUT I had an experience that puts another angle on this. I lived in a campaign headquarters in the middle of the Polish steel worker section of Chicago for a summer, and they would have gone ballistic if I had referred to them as “Polish people.” Remember, I’m an honorary Boston Southie and I am supposed to speak THEIR language. “Polish people” sounds like they are some kind of defensive minority group.

A couple of years later I met a girl from Boston. She wouldn’t say her last name. She was deeply ashamed of it. It was POLISH! In Boston being Polish or Irish makes you inferior. Nobody SAYS it, of course. It is so ingrained they don’t even NOTICE it.

When we were talking about families in Southie, I mentioned that my first ancestor here wrote the first book in English in America, converted and baptized Pocahontas, and DIED before the famous Pilgrims GOT here. To me that was an illustration of Southern history being ignored. To them it was a revelation. They had someone speaking for them whose families predated their Majesties the Cabots and the Lodges Themselves!

Until that moment, I didn’t fully realize how seriously they take this crap up there.

Anti-Catholic may mean more to Back Bay Grouch than it would to someone from Scarlet O’Hara and Cajun territory.

I don’t know how my mind works, and frankly I’m not sure I want to. But it turns out that what I said in the second one down, your responses, and the last one all come to perfect fit.

Mantra Thinking leads right on.

My little exploration into solid state physics and the nature of the self elicited a group of responses relating to that theory IN ITSELF and the mumbo-jumbo being generated to cover the fact that high-speed physics needs some new directions Orientals can’t develop, because observations are not backing it up.

It needs Nordics not wrapped up in Political Correctness, not more gypsies.

But I also wrote an article right after that about how this kind of thinking, Faustian thinking always ends up being PRACTICAL. Nothing looks more impractical than the list of basic research projects financed by the NSF. A list if the titles is sent to Capitol Hill each week and Senator Proxmire made hay by repeating these silly-sounding titles as wastes of taxpayer money that could be spent on welfare, etc.

Proxmire was a liberal, but the mush-minded respectable conservatives WORSHIPPED him. Many a science article pointed out, with examples, that Proxmire had a talent for attacking the most valuable research done. Some of which led to discoveries that saved his constituents’ lives. But you can’t expect the Buckleys to understand THAT.

If we are to reach the stars, which only whites can do, we will need to change the Buck Rogers vision. We will have to get out of light-speed-limited Einsteinian physics. We have already discovered that advances in communications and automation have made the Buck Rogers bit dated. We can send our eyes and ears where our bodies are a burden.

But we are not interested in sending our red corpuscles out. The idea is to send OURSELVES out, our SELVES. Our arms are no more part of our SELVES than the spacesuit it rides in.

Other Great Civilizations degenerate into mumbo-jumbo, so it’s easy to think that anything we can’t immediately understand is not worth understanding. That’s the Proxmire-Buckley approach. But we are NOT just another Great Civilization. We are WHITE.

Blacks degenerate, Orientals stagnate, whites INNOVATE. Only we can go to the stars.

In a world where the memory-hole is universal, NOTHING has gone down the media-history memory-hole like the Civil Rights’ mule-train. No one knows it now, but the day before the moon-launch in 1969, the entire Civil Rights’ “leadership” joined in a massive protest. A huge train of mule-driven wagons came to the Kennedy Space Center, protesting that the money to be used to go to the moon was not spent on welfare for blacks.

I have heard the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation bitch endlessly about how “money was blasted into space” instead of being given to THEM to add to their lifetime benefits. Half of the people I listened to bitch had some version of pacers for their heart of other devices which had been developed by the basic research involved in the huge moon landing effort.

The space effort was the basis of Silicon Valley, CA, now America’s biggest export, even beyond wheat, in the age of a declining dollar. That effort was the biggest BASIC RESEARCH effort in human history by far.

Our society spends a fraction of a percent of its money on BASIC research. The reason for this is that BASIC research, unlike development, is a general benefit to the society. You can’t get a patent on the results, and the benefits do not accrue directly to the person or company that does it.

But almost ALL of our advancing living standard, disease fighting, and all the rest derives from BASIC research, which development only DEVELOPS. So BASIC research has to compete for funds from the same donors who support welfare, vets’ benefits, “education,” housing, litigation for the poor, and all the rest.

I had to personally save the Hubble Telescope in its beginning stages because the all-important subcommittee which controlled NASA funding was entitled, “HUD and Other Independent Agencies.” So its chairman was a big-city liberal Democrat who wanted money for housing and none for NASA, and its ranking Republicans was a Philadelphia liberal who wanted likewise.

To save the Hubble telescope and the space effort in the first year of the Carter regime, with both houses and the administration anti-space, we had to do the impossible: beat the chairman AND the Republicans’ ranking member on a floor-vote.

Before that, we had to delay the whole House until the weekend when the four hundred thousand telegrams could show up and the scientists flown in. It was a trick move, so we had to move fast.

So the mule-train was just one more effort by the civil-righters and “Greatest Generation” to stop the last trickle of basic research money.

Now the group that calls itself “The Greatest Generation” is dying out. It could have lived a lot longer and a lot healthier if some of the money the Claude Peppers got for it had gone into the same basic research its pacemakers came from. There was PLENTY of time for generation-old basic research to filter into the huge benefits it always brings.

But they were with the Mule-Train crowd. They were for integration since they were out of school, and it was just a Great Cause for them to enjoy. But it cost them life and misery in the end. It even diverted huge sums of potential vet benefit money to welfare programs, mostly benefiting bureaucrats and the inside-the-Beltway consulting industry.

Great Society Washington had a saying, “If you want to make money, get into poverty.”

And, of course, the New America produced those muggers who kept the old folks imprisoned in their homes, or beaten in them, at night.

I’ve heard it a hundred times: “I was for integration, but the thing has gone too far.”

And I have said a hundred times, “We TOLD you it would go this far, and you laughed at us.”

Beware of what you ask for …

p