THE WRIGHT PERSPECTIVE: Unthanksgiving
My latest is up at EveryJoe. Sorry about the tasteless girly pictures, but it is the Rightwing way to do what Buzzfeed does.
Please stop by and play whackamole with the live-in troll.
There is an old Chinese legend of a golden scroll on which the secret of human happiness was written; and sages and warlords, merchant-princes and emperors sought the scroll with fervor. When found, they saw the secret of the scroll consisted of one ideogram printed over and over, an ideogram they could not read. However, there was a beggar girl who could read the mysterious word.
If you know that word, then you know the secret of human happiness.
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays for three reasons: first, it drives the Leftists crazy because it is a clearly and openly Christian holiday in the midst of a society they are fervidly attempting to dechristianize; second, it drives Leftists crazy because it is a holiday based on a historical fact, namely, Indian and Pilgrim cooperation, which flips the middle finger at the Leftist preferred narrative about non-civilized White men committing malign genocide on the non-savage Red men; and finally and most of all, it drives the Leftists crazy because the concept of being thankful, of feeling gratitude, of thanks for benefits never to be repaid, is utterly alien to their way of thinking and their way of life.
One benefit that accrues to the Christian, even if all of history, logic, and revelation should turn out to be false, and God a myth no more real than Global Warming, nonetheless, is that we Christian men feel gratitude toward our Creator for the infinite gift of creation. A noble pagan can indeed receive a gift in his stockings at Christmas, and be grateful to the giver, but a Christian can feel grateful for the legs he puts into his stockings each morning, and the world on which he walks.
The Left does not give thanks, not to anyone, human or divine, past or present, not for any reason.
Why not?
“You—who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders—there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.”
No matter what one thinks of Ayn Rand‘s conclusions on other topics, one ought to stand in awe of her incisive and unparalleled clarity of insight into the mind of the Collectivist. Each time I am tempted to think that the villains in her novels are caricatures or exaggerations, I meet one in real life.
Hers seems an extraordinary statement, to be sure, but regard the logic of it: If a Leftist were ever to feel gratitude, this would mean he felt a satisfaction of his demands. His demands would cease, hence, he would cease to be a Leftist.
The Leftists do not even have gratitude to their own pioneers and forefathers. Instead of erecting shrines, like noble prechristian heathens, to their ancestors, these postmodern postchristian heathens turn on their ancestors and rend them, and dishonor the memory even of their own founders. Like Jupiter casting castrated Saturn into Hell, they maim and condemn their own fathers.
An example comes from my own field, science fiction. If you are unfamiliar with the name Robert Heinlein, he is rightly called the Dean of Science Fiction; his pen is the one that first broke through from the pulps into the slicks, and then into juveniles, and then into the mainstream. Were it not for him, we would still be a Hugo Gernsbeckian ghetto.
Heinlein was also a bold advocate for equality of all races and both sexes, at a time when such ideas were not discussed in polite society. He was the main champion in our little Science Fiction ghetto of all things Progressive and Leftwing, that is, the Leftwing of that time. (They have since reversed their standards, for example, swapping a principled opposition to censorship to a full-throated advocacy of it, or swapping an unprincipled opposition to monogamy to an even more unprincipled advocacy of abstinence combined with libertinism.)
The Left owe Heinlein an immense debt of gratitude. Ergo they are ungrateful.
While working on the novel that was to become Rocket Ship Galileo, Heinlein warned his agent that the inclusion of an ethnically diverse cast was not only deliberate—it was non-negotiable, and if an editor requested the removal of the Jewish character, Blassingame (the agent) was to take the book elsewhere.
This is from the letter Heinlein wrote to his agent about his wishes:
“I have deliberately selected a boy of Scotch-English pioneer ancestry, a boy whose father is a German immigrant, and a boy who is American Jewish. Having selected this diverse background they are then developed as American boys without reference to their backgrounds. You may run into an editor who does not want one of the young heroes to be Jewish. I will not do business with such a firm. The ancestry of the three boys is a “must” and the book is offered under those conditions. My interest was aroused in this book by the opportunity to show to kids what I conceive to be Americanism. The use of a diverse group . . . is part of my intent; it must not be changed. . . . I am as disinterested as a referee but I want to get over an object lesson in practical democracy.”
Commenting on this is one Matt Wagner, freak, writing on the blog maintained by Tor books — one of the largest and most well-respected names in science fiction publishing, as well as being my own publisher. This is not some overlooked corner or outlier opinion.
Wagner snarks:
This is all admirable, but let’s keep in mind what’s missing from this cast: Asians; disabled people; non-Americans of any kind; lesbians, gays, and the transgendered; Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or representatives of the other major world religions. Heinlein’s book was enormously ethnically diverse in that it included the full variety of American Judeo-Christian boys.
And even the notion that the ethnically diverse boys are “developed as American boys without reference to their backgrounds” is a little creepy.
The freakish Mr. Wagner is not satisfied that Heinlein stormed the breach for them, being the first science fiction writer to put a Jew (Morrie Abrams from Rocket Ship Galileo), a Filipino (Juan Rico, Starship Troopers), a Negro (Rod Walker from Tunnel in the Sky implicitly and Mr. Kiku from The Star Beast explicitly) a Mohammedan (Dr. “Stinky” Mahmoud from Stranger in a Strange Land) or a Maori girl (Podkayne from Podkayne of Mars) in the spotlight as a main character and hero or heroine, but then criticizes Heinlein for not having as a main character … who? A cross-dressing homosexual castrati Hindu as a main character in a children’s book published in 1947? The Democrat Party still had Jim Crow laws and segregation in the South, and in those days the militant arm of the Democrat Party, the KKK, were still lynching blacks.
Do you understand to what the freakish Mr. Wagner is objecting? He is objecting to the melting pot theory that men of different races, locked into endless mutual hatred in the old world, can leave their hatred behind here in the new world. He is objecting to racelessness. Hence, he is a racist.
Heinlein showed backbone and gorm and ran the risk of being blackballed and put out of business by the Left (who, then as now, have major influence amounting to near total control in the New York publication industry) — and for this bold stance, unheard-of at the time, the gormless and freakish Mr Wagner criticizes Mr. Heinlein.
As Ayn Rand says, you cannot reason with such creatures, you cannot negotiate with them. Reasoning presupposes a standard of evidence that can be satisfied; negotiation presupposes a state of satisfaction that will silence further demands.
The extortion can be material, as for money, or social, as for status, or psychological, as for a sense of unearned self-esteem, but the defining characteristic of the Left is that these things extorted are not earned.
But a satisfied Leftist, a Leftist with nothing further to extort, is no longer a Leftist for the same reason that a Pirate who never plunders ships is not a Pirate, or a parasite without a host is no longer a parasite. They can never be satisfied.
Why? Do they want to be unhappy, always victims, always weak, always pathetic, whining, unmanned, absurd, pathetic, and gormless?
To find out why the Left are dickless and gormless, and what is the word written over and over again on the golden Chinese scroll, and what is the secret of human happiness, please read on.
http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/11/26/politics/unthanksgiving-leftists-hate-thanksgiving/
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
