Kevin D. Williamson - 23 July

Copyright 2019 by Kevin Williamson

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A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

I took the title of this book from Ayn Rand.

I took it from her because she doesnt deserve it.

History has thrown up a character whom we are accustomed to call the mass man. His appearance is spoken of as the most significant and far-reaching of all the revolutions of modern times. He is credited with having transformed our way of living, our standards of conduct and our manners of political activity. He is, sometimes regretfully, acknowledged to have become the arbiter of taste, the dictator of policy, the uncrowned king of the modern world. He excites fear in some, admiration in others, wonder in all. His numbers have made him a giant; he proliferates everywhere; he is recognized either as a locust who is making a desert of what was once a fertile garden, or as the bearer of a new and more glorious civilization.

Michael Oakeshott, The Masses in Representative Democracy, 1961

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for vulgarity; they called it apeirokalia , lack of experience in things beautiful.

Leo Strauss, What Is Liberal Education? 1959

I used to work not far from a temple in New Delhi dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey-faced Hindu deity who is the patron of the capital citya 108-foot tall statue of him looms over the Jhandewalan metro station. Monkeys are a problem. Basically, you cant fuck with a monkey in Delhi, for religious and civic reasons, so theres a plague of the things all over the city but especially in the temple precincts. They are basically high-IQ New York subway rats with opposable thumbs. Its not good.

The pilgrims come to seek Hanumans blessing, and they feed the monkeysfeeding the plague. The amateurs bring them bananas and fruit and such, but the real prosthe Hanuman-worship insidersbring the monkeys what they really like: McDonalds.

Theyre lovin it.

The monkeys in India are a gigantic pain in the ass and a genuine menace, too: Every now and then, they kill somebody, or maim somebody pretty good. I once made the mistake of walking home to my apartment in Delhi after dark with a bag of kebabs for dinner, and by the time I got to my place I was being chased by about forty mangy and scrofulous dogs who were keenly interested in my takeout. (From Karims, of course: worlds best.) Dogs you can deal with. Imagine if it had been monkeys.

Working for The Atlantic was kind of like that.

If youve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos that smell very intensely the way you imagine that Bernie Sanders probably smells faintly, you know what monkeysthese particular monkeysare like: They jerk off and fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they dont do a hell of a lot else, unless theres McDonalds. All day: jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling.

Twitter, basically.

And after about 300,000 years of anatomically modern H. sap ., here we are again: monkeys, albeit monkeys with wifi. You could try being human beings. You could. You could try a little freedom on for size, and see how it fits and feels. You arent going to. We both know that.

Jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling.

I hate monkeys.

This is their story.

A number of great significance in the Dharmic religions.

A s a matter of contemporary etiquette, we writers and talkers are not supposed to call ourselves intellectuals. It sounds like bragging, and we cant have thatwe are supposed to rely on mediating irony and moral mumbling, lest we stumble into the great error and great sin of Trying Too Hard. We all know what happens to the tallest poppy. Its strange: If I were an unusually tall, green-eyed, Flemish-American hermaphrodite running for Congress as a Republicanand the Republicans should be so lucky!the convention would be for me to begin every third sentence, As an unusually tall, green-eyed, Flemish-American hermaphrodite, I believe that... or, If elected, I will be the first unusually tall, green-eyed, Flemish-American hermaphrodite elected to the House as a Republican, or, In America, an unusually tall, green-eyed, Flemish-American hermaphrodite can grow up to be anything, even another asinine, useless, beef-witted politician, one who is blessed to have been born in this great country with two distinct sets of sex organs and a burning desire to put them to work for Americafor We the People.

Intellectuals . You can practically see the foamy little green droplets of contempt running off the word. And so the intellectuals have, for some time, been obliged to pretend to be something else: your friend, the tribune of the plebs, the advocate of the common man, or, worst of all, the realist, the one who wants to use common sense on behalf of ordinary folk in the pursuit of what works.

Clever little monkeys, in their way. They seem almost human at times.

You know the type: I was once on a panel with Cleta Mitchell, one of those gold-plated Republican populists who is always going on and on about the Washington Establishment and insiders. I told her I thought she was more or less full of it, andwe were in front of an audience of conservativesshe raged that I was an example of inside-the-Beltway Establishment thinking. I am a writer who lives in Texas and who is not even a member of the Republican party, much less part of its establishment. Cleta Mitchell literally works inside the Beltwaythe asphalt one, in Washington, D.C., not a metaphorical oneat the politically connected law firm of Foley & Lardner, right there on Washington Harbor, where she... oh, heres a bit of her official firm biography: Ms. Mitchell represents numerous candidates, campaigns and members of Congress, as well as state and national political party committees. She has served as legal counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. She is such an outsider that she appears on a Fox News program called Insiders , and sheyou could not make this upliterally wrote the book on being a lobbyist in Washington: The Lobbying Compliance Handbook .

Establishment. Inside the Beltway. That rotten, fruity languagethat utterly nonsensical adolescent horseshitjust comes naturally to some people. I once had a state Republican party chairman tell me that the Establishment in my state hates me. I asked him who, exactly, composed this Establishment, if not the chairman of the goddamned party? He looked at me as a goldfish would if it saw a strange new underwater castle. It took me a long time to decipher what that look means. It means: But I thought we were friends!