The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these

Dear H-,

The best targets for swindlers are the youngest and the oldest; and the oldest prove it because they're the best at fooling themselves.  We know this because we asked a bunch of hundred year-olds how they got to be a hundred and got a hundred different answers.  One woman said it was garlic.  Another one said it was wine.  Others said not drinking wine and others said walks and none of them said medicine; and what we concluded is that a hundred year-old survives to a hundred by dumb luck.  There's no real science to survival and our survivors have proved it.  They were all shooting blind and got bullseyes; and the people who gave us good answers are all buried.

The fact that such a sorry and superstitious bunch should be our winners in life (if indeed surviving everyone you ever fell in love with is winning) is almost too silly to be believed; and further proof that Solomon was right when he said the battle is not to the strong, nor food to the wise, nor wealth to the brilliant nor favor to the learned.  We thought we would get smarter as we got older and all we got was our elderly.  As such we look to our oldest almost as little as we look to our youngest; and the window of opportunity not just for learning things, but for retaining the things that we've learned, seems to reside somewhere in the middle age.  We begin as a joke only to take ourselves seriously; only to find out, slowly and surely, that our taking ourselves seriously was the punchline.

But the youngster doesn't suffer from a rapidly disintegrating brain, and this makes his idiocy different.  His problem is he has no knowledge or experience, and this lack of both leads him to fall in love with the two things more dangerous to him than anything else: sluts and Utopians.  He's never seen a Utopia and he's never seen anyone try to build a Utopia; and because he's never seen anyone trying he's never seen anyone failing.  What the prophet wants sounds good, so he assumes the prophet must be a good person and that anyone who opposes said prophet must be a moron, or a villain.

What happens next is clockwork.   He has nothing to counterbalance a scheme with, goosesteps himself right into a gulag, and some middle-aged swindler at the height of his powers waltzes into government and steals all the desirables — and probably alongside them the women.  Old people may fall for a business scam but they'll rarely fall for Utopia.   Young people are suckers for both.  It's no wonder that leftism, the combination of a business scam and a utopian scheme, appeals most seriously to our youngsters*.

Thus the great failure of our leftward-sliding West has been almost entirely one of pedagogy.  Somewhere in the development of our civilization we decided to have the state run our schools; and in the overwhelming flood of teachers resulting therefrom, most of whom we can neither really know nor properly assess, we forgot that our teachers were actually people, that because of this many of them had agendas, and that wherever you concentrate the children you can be sure to get radicals and pedophiles.  Players love sorority girls because they're dumb enough to be easy.  A radical knows adults are too smart for him so he decides to go after their children.  The man in a state of arrested development, who never learned, either due to personal incompetence or a bad case of day-dreaming, the difference between and what works and what doesn't, and who believes the world can be made entirely right and that if it isn't made right it's our fault, is given charge of the children, and the children who never grow up because of him are given charge of the state.

I can't say with any surety that I'm familiar with the demographics of suicide bombers, but nearly every picture I've seen of them has been either a young man or an ugly middle-aged woman. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.  The rest of us, if we can make it past either of these stages, will at best inherit the earth — and then eventually be taken by email scams.

Thus the chief goal of the conservative is not to "take back our country."  It's to take back our schools.  It's to gather up our best men, have many of them forget about going into business, and teach our kids how to sniff out a Utopian.

Yours,
-J
February 6, 2018

*Orlando Figes confirms, in his history of the Russian Revolution, that in a rapidly disintegrating society "a student" is synonymous with "a radical."  Rebecca West also paints a fascinating account, in The New Meaning of Treason, of universities flooded with fascists and communists before the arrival of the Third Reich.  That we have reached this point is beyond dispute, and my Hispanic mother, who has memories of students being whipped into a frenzy and sent out to do battle, blames the tragedy of Honduras not entirely on the drugs, but primarily on the communist Utopians.  The survival of our students is the death of the republic.  As such I propose this novel solution.

Over the last week a great controversy arose between intelligent people and animals about whether any country was better than another, and whether any countries that were worse than the others could be called "shitholes."  What the left wing has forgotten is that there's this thing we call a "banned country" and a list we put dangerous countries on called a "travel warning;" and the purpose of these two things (which nobody had a problem with until this week) is to decide that some countries are such shitholes that Americans are either strongly cautioned against traveling there or outright banned from it.

For the sake of the country and its moral health I propose removing this watchlist immediately. Let our socialists vacation in Venezuela.  Let critics of American imperialism have their honeymoons in North Korea.  Let everyone who believes all countries are good travel to all countries; let us thin the herd of self-righteous social-studies majors and other half-wits; and let the world be blessed with our fattest and dumbest tourists — who will take up their new careers as professional sex slaves, martyrs, and ransom bait. We don't need them, we don't want them, and the resort towns by Mogadishu are all relatively affordable.  Stupidity isn't only supposed to be painful but in its worst forms to be fatal; and in a democracy the best you can hope for is that a dimwit only gets himself killed. 

*The Matrix 3 may not have been a great movie but it was of the three films the greatest allegory.  Neo went to Zion only to find that Zion, the supposed salvation of humanity, hadn't only seen several saviors but that it had been repeatedly destroyed because of them.  The college student wasn't alive for Mao or Hitler or Stalin; and he doesn't know that for every Hitler Mao and Stalin there were a million fascist and communist students all fist-fighting each other in the universities; and that when they established Zion it was worse than what they begin with.  A true Utopian believes he's the first.  A well-educated man knows he's the last.