Just loosen your collar—this will all be over in a moment
“They live in the northernmost
community in Canada,” said the fellow at the hamburger joint. “They’re Inuit,
and have been living there for more than 2,000 years. They used to follow the caribou
herds from place to place, but the government has settled them down, and now
they have a permanent village, with the houses built up high, above the
permafrost.”
He then told me that the
government had given them a quota for fishing turbot, and if they fell short of
the quota, the government would make up for the shortfall by a cash grant. Until
recently, they’ve attached themselves to international fishing expeditions, but
now they have purchased a ship of their own. That was why they had flown the 4,000
miles from the 15th parallel to our island on the 46th—to take possession of
the ship. The cost of the ship was borne by the government. I don’t know
whether the $20,000 for four round-trip plane tickets was also borne by the
government—that is to say, by other people, with the government middlemen
taking their substantial cut—but it wouldn’t surprise me.
“I suppose,” I said, “that living
in such a forbidding place, they don’t have the social problems they have in,
say, Yellowknife,” the capital of the Northwest Territories, notorious for
alcoholism and family breakdown. My reasoning was simple. You can’t survive
from one year to the next unless you preserve moral order.
“No, they have the same problems
there that they have all over the Territories,” he replied, and he put the
blame squarely on Ottawa. “Paternalistic” was the word he used.
The conversation caused me to
consider what a place like Yellowknife has in common with, say, Detroit. Yellowknife
is a small town on the Great Slave Lake, in the midst of the richest mineral
deposits on Earth. It is, for all that, a deeply dysfunctional place. Detroit
used to be the jewel of the Great Lakes, the auto capital of the world. It is
now a pit of crime. Whole neighborhoods have been abandoned. The current mayor,
Dave Bing, has ordered some of them to be plowed under, to turn them back to
grasslands, perhaps for pasturing sheep.
It’s not just Detroit, and money
alone is not the problem. A good friend of mine used to tell me stories of
growing up in Philadelphia after the war. His family was poor, but so was
everybody else’s in the neighborhood. The streets were safe. He and his friends
would often jump a train on the Main Line, just to hang around one of the
outlying towns for a day, and then come back at suppertime, and nobody thought
anything of it. People used to wonder how the economist Thomas Sowell could
have attained such prestige, having grown up in Harlem; but he would tell them
that when he was a boy, Harlem was a pretty good place for children, and the
schools were solid. The teachers knew their subjects, and insisted on good
behavior. And families were mostly intact.
I don’t suggest that there is only
one cause to explain what happened to Detroit, Harlem, Yellowknife,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, and so on. I do want to suggest a significant
cause and, in a short time, a sufficient cause,
which I’ll call the Vampire State.
The two things to keep in mind
about vampires are that they need blood and that they confer a wraith-like
immortality upon their victims. It is an inverted symbiosis. Vampire and victim
remain alive forever, but it is a death-in-life, dependent upon the consumption
of health.
The Vampire State needs blood. It
can never have enough. The deal it cuts with the victim is simple enough. “You
are weak,” says the Vampire State. “You are needy. You will soon die. I can
help you. I can make you last forever. But you must give me your blood: your
initiative, your moral strength, your independence, your manhood and womanhood,
your folkways, and your self-government. I have the money—my business with
other of my, er, clients. I will give this to you. The gift involves a little
transfusion. Kindly loosen your shirt collar, and it will be over in a moment.”
The Vampire State must have victims, whom it “helps” in this way. Its prime
directive is to survive as it is, upon the blood of false charity. The Amish
govern themselves, and keep the Vampire State at bay. The Vampire State will
encourage none of the habits and the virtues that
would make the victims of its benevolence more like the Amish.
The Amish do not countenance
divorce. Their families are strong and, as much as is possible in this vale of
tears and sinners, happy. The Vampire State cannot abide strong families. So it
seeks to divide man from woman, and woman from child. It will reward women with
blood if they bear children out of wedlock; and if those women should be so
foolish as to marry, the transfusion ends. “You had better stay single,”
whispers the Vampire. “You need what I give you.”
Vampires have a weird hankering
for women. The Vampire is like the eunuch in charge of a great harem of female
wraiths. How to build up the harem? The Vampire’s strategy these days is disarmingly
simple: promote the independence of women, with great noise and chivalry. Now,
most healthy women actually want to marry a good and reliable man, who will
provide for them and their children. The Vampire despises such women, and
encourages others to despise them too, so that the women themselves will begin
to doubt that something may be wrong with them. The Vampire reasons thus. For
every woman who goes forth in fierce independence, I will attain two or three
who will either never find a completely reliable man, or who will turn to Me
for their sustenance. It is a real bargain. And once I have them for a few
years, their children will also be mine. Not one step will you take, without my
permission or my “support.”
Healthy people seek solutions to
problems. The Vampire seeks problems. The Vampire State must, however, appear
to be attacking crime, and will therefore multiply crimes to attack. This it
will do in two ways. It will criminalize perfectly ordinary things, like
spanking a child or drinking soda; and it will permit and
encourage pathological things that help to destroy those
institutions that provide for genuine life, genuine community, and genuine law.
After it has reduced the churches to rubble, the Vampire expresses astonishment
and grave concern when rogues rule the streets; which gives the Vampire cause
to “intervene,” with canines.
I’ve mentioned the churches. The
Vampire State will, at times, tolerate the churches, and even appear to
encourage them, so long as they remain subservient. But that tolerance is never
stable. For there is a deep enmity between the Vampire State and the churches. The
reasons are easy to see. The Vampire does evil, and on some level must know it;
but the churches uphold an absolute condemnation of evil. The Vampire feeds on
weakness; but the churches attempt to perfect the natural virtues by Christian
love. The Vampire is gray and ugly and dead; the churches are founts of living
water. Not all of them, mind you; the Vampire State has suborned quite a few. But
even those can yet repent of their ways.
The Vampire State, I’ve said,
despises ordinary women. It fears ordinary
men. An ordinary healthy man might command the respect of his fellows. He might
preach a godly self-reliance which is a form of charity for his neighbors. He
might wean some people off the dead blood. He might even try to hammer a stake
through the Vampire’s heart. The Vampire can’t have that. For the Vampire is an
effeminate old cad. His métier is not honest confrontation and clear debate,
but subterfuge and seduction.
So the last thing the Vampire
State wants is a lot of strong men around. These days, the Vampire State has
conceived the idea of promoting sexual deviance among men. A troop of Boy
Scouts is dangerous—to the Vampire; silver bullets and all that. So the Vampire
holds parades for men who depend completely upon the Vampire to enforce social
approval for their pathologies.
The Vampire State likes blood. More
than one million unborn children in the United States every year shed their
blood to keep the Vampire State alive. The Vampire knows well: if human life is
sacred, then the sexual union of man and woman, which brings life, must also be
sacred. If that union is sacred, then marriage is sacred. If the sanctity of
marriage is upheld, then it is possible—just possible—that healthy and
independent communities will be born. In such communities, the Vampire is not
welcome. No, the Vampire will shed a little tear or two, and then consume the
blood. Eventually the Vampire will get around to manufacturing his human
victims—when his dependent vampires are sufficiently drained of genuine
humanity and life to oppose him.
What
does the all-competent, all-meddling, all-controlling modern state do? Simple
to answer. What would the Vampire do?
