Dolphinplasty as a principle of governance
By Spengler
You can define a mythical creature with precision, observed St Thomas Aquinas,
but that doesn't make a phoenix exist. To be there, things actually have to
have the property of existence. St Thomas would be a party-pooper in today's
politics, where "yes, we can" means that we can do whatever we want, even if it
violates custom, the constitution or the laws of nature.
The television cartoon South Park offers a useful allegory for the
administration's flight from realism. In one episode the children's teacher, Mr
Garrison, gets a sex change, little Kyle gets negroplasty (to turn him
into a tall black basketball star), while Kyle's father undergoes dolphinplasty,
that is, surgery to make him look like a dolphin.
Looking like a dolphin, of course, doesn't make you one. Sadly, the Barack
Obama administration hasn't figured this out. Out of
the confusion of its first 100 days, we can glimpse a unifying principle, and
that principle looks remarkably like the sort of plastic surgery practiced in
South Park.
Like dolphinplasty and negroplasty, it has given us cosmetic
solutions that we might call civitaplasty, turning a terrorist gang into
a state; fiducioplasty, making a bunch of bankrupt institutions look
like functioning banks; creditoplasty, making government seizure of
private property look like a corporate reorganization; matrimonioplasty,
making same-sex cohabitation look like a marriage; and interfecioplasty,
making murder look like a surgical procedure.
There is a consistent theme to the administration's major policy initiatives:
Obama and his advisors start from the way they think things ought to be and
work backwards to the uncooperative real world. If reality bars the way, it had
better watch out. In the South Park episode, the plastic surgery
underwent catastrophic failures too disgusting to recount here. Obama's attempt
to carve reality into the way things ought to be will also undergo catastrophic
failure, perhaps in even more disgusting ways.
Consider the reorganization of Chrysler, perhaps the most traumatic event to
afflict the credit market in living memory. In 2007, Chrysler borrowed US$10
billion secured by its assets - real estate, brand names and other collateral.
According to the US Bankruptcy Code, senior creditors have first claim on
assets in the event of failure. The Obama administration, though, offered the
senior creditors just 33 cents on the dollar, but gave a group of junior
creditors, the United Auto Workers Union, 55 cents on the dollar. Most of the
senior creditors are banks receiving federal assistance, and they of course did
not object. Some creditors did object, and Obama denounced them on the airwaves
as "speculators". Some of the creditors received death threats, and other
creditors report that the White House threatened to destroy their reputations.
This is not a credit market, but creditoplasty. What is it that gives
existence to a credit market? "Credit" derives from the Latin verb credere,
to believe. We trust other people with our money because we believe that they
will repay it with interest, and because we believe that the courts will uphold
our contractual rights in the event of a dispute. Credit markets do not exist
in most of the world's countries because faith is absent in the good will of
counterparties and the impartiality of the law. In most countries, might makes
right: the ruling clique takes what it wants, as King Ahab took Naboth's
vineyard. There is no rule of law. No one invests except through a corrupt deal
with the ruling clique. No firm grows beyond what the members of a family can
manage, and no excess capital remains in the country. Labor languishes for lack
of capital.
A few countries, notably those blessed with a heritage of English common law,
have credit markets. Savings turn seamlessly into investment, prospective
retirees lend their savings with confidence to young people building families,
homes and businesses, and tomorrow's prospective income is transformed into
today's wealth through the power of faith in the future.
Obama's handling of the Chrysler bankruptcy has destroyed this faith. No
investor remains in the Chrysler deal out of belief in the company's future, or
out of faith in the legal system to uphold contractual rights. The big banks
are there because Obama has them on life support. The smaller creditors are
there because Obama has threatened them with reputational ruin, and persons
unnamed have threatened them with violence. The UAW is here because it has a
political deal with the White House. Violence, fraud and corruption hold
together Chrysler Motors, in the sad template of Third World finance - not
faith or belief. Force and fraud destroy faith, in fact, erase the possibility
of faith for a very long time to come.
Apart from Chrysler, no investor trusts America's largest banks. They can
borrow money in the markets because the federal government guarantees it -
nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars of bank bonds guaranteed by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation have come to market this year. They can make
profits if and when the government says they can, for the government tells each
bank how much capital it must raise and by how much it must dilute its
shareholders' equity.
The banks depend on Treasury funding to securitize assets, and on the balance
sheet of the Federal Reserve to provide a bid for their assets. They are not
fiduciaries, but the product of fiducioplasty, the mere cosmetic
appearance of banking. Cynical calculation about the administration's political
goals replaces assessment of bank business models, as I have chronicled at my
finance blog, "Inner Workings."
The analogy to plastic surgery holds in the field of foreign policy as well,
where the president's special ambassadors have fanned out to solicit the good
graces of the world's terrorists. The White House wants to get Iran involved in
Afghanistan, offer the Taliban a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan, give
Syria a key negotiating role, and pitch a Palestinian state with involvement
from Hamas. Out of this witches' cauldron, the administration hopes to conjure
up a Palestinian state - call it civitaplasty. Giving guns and money to
a collection of individuals on a given spot of ground, though, does not make a
people, much less a state.
What does constitute a state? Cicero defined a people as an assemblage with
common interests. In the City of God (XIX, 23), St Augustine took issue
with the great statesman of the Roman republic: "A people [rather] is the
association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement of
the objects of their love ... to observe the character of a particular people
we must examine the objects of its love." He continued:
God rules the
obedient city according to His grace, so that it sacrifices to none but Him,
and whereby, in all the citizens of this obedient city, the soul consequently
rules the body and reason the vices in the rightful order, so that, as the
individual just man, so also the community and people of the just, live by
faith, which works by love, that love whereby man loves God as He ought to be
loved, and his neighbor as himself - there, I say, there is not an assemblage
associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and by a community of
interests. But if there is not this, there is not a people, if our definition
be true, and therefore there is no republic; for where there is no people there
can be no republic.
What is it that Hamas loves? According to
numerous of its spokesmen in repeated statements over the years, what it loves
is death. "We love death more than the Jews love life," Hamas says. Hamas
leader Ismail Haniya told an American interviewer last year that his fighters
were willing to die, whereas "the Jews love life more than any other people,
and they prefer not to die". The leader of Hamas' ally, the Iranian-backed
Shi'ite organization Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, said, "We have
discovered how to hit the Jews where they are most vulnerable. The Jews love
life, so that is what we shall take from them. We will win because the Jews
love life, and we love death."
A people held together by a common love of death is a contradiction in terms.
It is a non-people, that is, a people dedicated to its own destruction. It
cannot form a state. In my view, the love of death evinced by Islamist
authorities expresses despair about the future of Islamic civilization in a
modern world.
This year's most-cited book on Islam, Ali Allawi's The Crisis of Islamic
Civilization, makes the case poignantly. The Palestinians cannot resign
themselves to the misery of their circumstances as a backward and poorly
adapted people in a modern world. Many of them, including a very large number
of their young men, would rather die. Civitaplasty can produce only the
cosmetic imitation of a state, but not the genuine article.
By the same principle, the anti-realists of the Obama administration believe
that they can define marriage to be whatever they want it to mean. Matrimoniaplasty
makes same-sex cohabitation look like a marriage, on the premise that marriage
is a right. That is just what the Spanish government intends in giving
transgender men the "right" to be women, with a passport to prove it. In
social-democratic Spain, a man can don high heels and lipstick, and obtain a
passport certifying himself to be a herself. Men, however, do not have a right
to be women; they can obtain a "female" ID, but not a date for Saturday night.
Marriage is not a right, but rather a state, in which two people become one
flesh.
Simply because we set out the parameters of a market, a corporation, a bank, a
state, or a marriage does not mean it has any more claim on reality that St
Thomas' phoenix. Some combination of natural capacity and sense of sanctity,
melded by many years of human experience, give existence to such things. The
flight from realism will leave us with neither credit, nor civility, nor
domesticity. Like little Kyle's knees in the cited South Park episode,
these substitutes for reality will blow up in our face.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, Associate Editor of First
Things (www.firstthings.com).
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