House of Eratosthenes

In Atlas Shrugged there is a character called “Kip’s Ma.” Her real name is supposed to be Emma Chalmers, and she’s the mother of Kip Chalmers, a bureaucrat who is placed in a position of high influence because of his blandness and mediocrity. Kip Chalmers was a typical Ayn Rand villain, spazzing out at every little crisis, yelling in a high-pitched panic voice about “Must Ought Should Ought Must Must Must” stuff at the top of his lungs.

As a direct result of people like Kip Chalmers being in charge of things, a train tunnel collapses, flattening some massive number of people in what is referred to as the Taggart Tunnel Disaster. Among the flattened (and exploded and immolated and asphyxiated) deceased, is Kip. Kip is promptly forgotten, while his up-until-then-unmentioned mother is elevated to a God-like status in the bureaucracy of which Kip never could have dreamed. She starts talking, everyone else in the room stops in mid-sentence to hear what she has to say. And why shouldn’t they, her son was killed after all.

This doesn’t work out so hot, since the reason “Kip’s Ma” gets to run around deciding how everyone else is going to live, has little-to-nothing to do with her ideas being any good — it has to do with her son being killed. Long after the last mention of Kip Chalmers himself, and, I speculate, long after anyone would be able to remember a thing about him (nor has “Kip’s Ma” taken the time to mention anything about him), Ma hits on a novel idea: Let’s solve the wheat famine by forgetting about wheat. Wheat is a western innovation, after all, and it emerges that Kip’s Ma has a hostility to such things. Soybeans are the way to go. The orient is smarter than we are about some things, and this has to be one of those things.

The country switches to soy. Kip’s Ma lost her son, after all.

Well, soy has to be handled in a certain way. In this case, the beans were picked too soon. They are green when they’re off the vine, and rot before they are ever edible. Millions starve. Maybe they would have starved, anyway, if they were fed wheat instead of soy. But as things stand, they never had a shot.

Because Kip’s Ma lost a son, after all.

It’s the confluence of several significant events that threaten to cost “Kip’s Ma” — read that as an aggregate body consisting of Michael Berg, Cindy Sheehan, and others — her job. Zarqawi, the terrorist who seems to have personally sawed off the head of Michael Berg’s son Nick, while the victim was still alive, is now dead. The elder Berg thinks this is a sad thing, doubts that Zarqawi was responsible, and instead puts the blame on President Bush. To most Americans, that’s surreal.

Just as we’re trying to come to grips with Mr. Berg’s viewpoint, and probably spending vastly more energy trying to do so compared to what we would spend on the silly and unsustainable viewpoint of a lesser mortal — he lost his son, after all — Ann Coulter points out what privately, we all have known, but something on which publicly, we have kept our silence. The anti-war left selects spokespeople like Cindy Sheehan, who don’t necessarily know anything, but have been affected by personal tragedy. This is a tactic. It is done to intimidate anyone who may be opposed to the viewpoints of the bereaved, from speaking out against them. It may be fair, it may be unfair, but what it definitely is is an assault on truth and logic, for truth and logic are not being used to select the perspective that will carry the day.

Just as truth and logic weren’t used to select soybeans.

In fact, truth and logic have no place in the equation. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd famously opined that Cindy Sheehan’s “moral authority” is “absolute.” As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, this is disingenuous because it can’t be anything but: That class of parent which has lost a child in the war, is a class that encompasses thousands of bereaved instances, some of whom are in favor of the war. If absolute moral authority is conferred because of membership in this class, how can they all have absolute authority when they disagree?

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times claims that Sheehan’s “moral authority” on the war is “absolute.” This is obtuse. Sheehan’s diatribes against George Bush — “lying bastard”; “filth-spewer and warmonger”; “biggest terrorist in the world” — have no more moral standing than Joseph Kennedy’s vilification of Franklin Roosevelt. And if Sheehan speaks with absolute moral authority, then so does Diane Ibbotson — and the other mothers who have lost sons in Iraq yet continue to support the mission their sons died for and bitterly oppose Sheehan for discrediting it.

Undeterred by such logic, the anti-war left has sounded the call for an all-out-assault against Ann Coulter, and as is typical of anti-Coulter attacks, there is silence where one would expect to find a justification for the attack. Why are we supposed to get outraged against what she said? Of course I’m a doo doo head for asking and a variety of other nasty things; but what’s the answer to my question? As Kevin McCullouch pointed out this morning, it appears that what she said is a hundred percent true:

An interesting point: When the GOP invited widows of 9-11 to participate in their national convention, charges went up from the left of “pure political posturing.” Yet any observer of those who participated would be hard-pressed to know of a single critical thing they said about the president’s opponents. The presentation they made dealt with the need for America to remain strong in its stand against terrorism. Kerry’s name was never even invoked, and their involvement in the public debate ended that night.

The Jersey Girls, on the other hand, have consistently spoken out and advocated on behalf of leftist interests through the 9-11 commission’s findings to the operation of the global War on Terror, the elections of 2004, etc. In other words, they chose, or the liberal Democratic Party chose for them, to enter the fray, to don the gloves and to mix it up.

But what if they’re wrong? What if, even in as much pain as they have endured at the hands of terrorists, the substance of what they argue for is as loony as the day is long? Even if Cindy Sheehan lost her heroic son in the War on Terror, does that now mean that everything Cindy Sheehan says is correct?

Which is Ann’s point.

Ann’s criticism is legitimate. If liberals in America wish truly to have a debate on the issues that we all have strong emotions about, then stand and make the point, but don’t hide behind those who are ineffective, unskilled and often wrong in their views, simply because they’re victims.

And this is kind of along the lines of what I was pointing out yesterday: “Liberals in America” may desire to have a debate about policy, but they are not acting like they do. For one thing, if the debate should include — rather, if the debate should enshrine — those who have their opinions because of the loss of a loved one, let us see the issues advanced by those who have their opinions because of the loss of a loved one. What’s up with these lifetime, or virtual-lifetime, activists? A noisy advocate of the likes of Michael Berg or Cindy Sheehan, doesn’t fill the bill. If you’ve always been anti-war, and one day you lost your child to the war, then the death of the child didn’t change your mind and therefore had nothing to do with forming the opinion. There was no epiphany, no expansion of the horizons, no learning involved, just an intensifying of feeling, nothing more.

Even granting the premise that this status gives him some special authority to comment, and/or knowledge about what’s going on — and that’s an extravagant premise — this would have importance to the rest of us, if and only if Michael Berg’s opinion were somehow shaped by this tragic event. No compelling evidence that this is the case, has ever come to my attention…not once. In point of fact, of all the relatives of military and civilian casualities arising from this conflict, right back to September 11, 2001 — among those grieving relatives who are anti-war now, to the best I can determine, each and every single one of them were anti-war while their loved ones were still alive.

I’m sure there are exceptions to that somewhere. But I don’t know of any. More importantly, nobody’s taking the time to point such examples out to me. “Bob is against the war; Bob’s son was killed in the war.” The implication is that Bob knows more than I do — but that’s logically unsustainable, if somewhere you can’t find a “Bob” who was apathetic about the war…or in favor of the war…and he came to be anti-war after his son was killed. If you found someone like that, then he could talk about this broadened sense of perspective he had, and the things he came to learn as a result thereof, after this terrible tragedy in his family.

We’re witnessing a multi-flank assault that is truly devastating, as we are supposed to. But the multi-flank assault is not being inflicted on Ann Coulter, as the anti-war left intends, nor does the assaulting force have much to do with spicy emotions, as they intend. The assault is on the “Kip’s Ma” brigade and the assaulter is simple common sense.

I have doubts that the “Kip’s Ma” brigade can survive this assault. It could emerge unscratched from a single-front assault; this is what it is designed to do. But an offense from several directions, simultaneously, each broadside attack the product of simple common-sense questions, is bound to peel the support from the movement like the peeling from a banana. Well, all the support save for what is most fanatical. This is the Achilles’ Heel of “accuse the accuser” defenses: You have to have a target to do any accusing at all, so this defense is inextricably intertwined with the single-front assault it is designed to counterattack.

That isn’t what’s happening anymore. The “Kip’s Ma” regime is about to be toppled.

This is a good thing. We never had a good prognosis for surviving them, any more than the starving people in Atlas Shrugged could hope to survive “Kip’s Ma” and her soybean diet.

[…] years ago I compared the anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan to a character out of Atlas Shrugged who, like Sheehan, suffered or relished the status of bereaved mother (perhaps a little bit of […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/25/2012 @ 11:33

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“Kip’s Ma” Loses Her JobFriday, June 9th, 2006

“Kip’s Ma” Loses Her Job
Friday, June 9th, 2006