On the Big Lie

“And I think he’s right,” Mr. Bates concluded. “We live in a dangerous world now, and we need that kind of protection.”

“But that’s the big lie,” Mr. Magundi said, taking the newspaper from Mr. Bates and pointing at the article. “It’s right there in what Mayor Bloomberg said. Here it is: ‘As the world gets more dangerous, people are willing to have infringements on their personal freedoms that they would not before.’ But it’s just a lie: the world hasn’t got more dangerous. Crime has plummeted since Mayor Bloomberg was a young man. And the 1970s were really the golden age of terrorism, when ‘take this plane to Cuba’ was a standard punch line in sketch comedy. In most ways we’re actually safer now than we were thirty or forty years ago. But we’ve been told so many times that we need to be afraid that, naturally, we’re afraid. And once we believe the lie that we’re in much more danger now than we ever were before, we gratefully submit ourselves to the whims of the first big bully who promises to keep us safe.

“I’ve said it before: there will always be a current emergency. So the question is whether our rights and freedoms ever exist in the real world, or whether they are merely theoretical ideals that can never be real this side of heaven. I want my rights here in the world of today; Mayor Bloomberg says I have to wait for heaven. You can decide which point of view you like better.”

On Supermarket Tabloids

“I was looking at those papers at the checkout counter last night,” Mrs. Bowman was saying. “I really don’t know how they get away with making stuff up about the president like that.”

“I don’t think it’s right to say they make stuff up,” Mr. Magundi replied. “Supermarket tabloids, at least when they touch on politics, deal in metaphor. Their target readers are—to be uncharitable but strictly accurate—sort of stupid. They have strong feelings, but they can’t articulate reasons for them. So the supermarket tabloids give them a metaphor that describes perfectly what they feel.

“In the waning days of the previous administration, the tabloid readers were sick of President Bush. They couldn’t say why, but they knew they were very angry with him. So the supermarket tabloids were full of stories about his marriage. His wife was going to divorce him within days of leaving the White House, because he had been unfaithful with a string of tawdry mistresses. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, true, but it was a metaphor that perfectly described the dissatisfaction of the tabloid readers: George W. Bush had been an unfaithful husband to America.

“Now the tabloid readers are dissatisfied with President Obama, so the tabloids give them a metaphor to describe how they feel: he’s not a real American at all, and he’s not a Christian—he’s a dirty foreign infidel who wants to sell our country to the terrorists. Once again, the facts are false, but as a metaphor the story perfectly describes what the tabloid readers are feeling. There’s a lot more truth in those crazy tabloids than we usually give them credit for—not truth about politics, but truth about the mind of Middle America.”

On China

“How did we end up owing most of our country to China, anyway?” Mr. Bates was grumbling.

“You have to give the Chinese credit for the most successful crash course in capitalism ever seen in the history of the world,” Mr. Magundi said. “When it became clear to their leaders that the key to world power was economic rather than military, they set about gaining that power in a methodical and relentless fashion. Even fifteen years ago, it was possible for American politicians to talk seriously about sanctions against Chinese imports; now everyone knows that sanctions would completely destroy the American economy. The Chinese have earned the power they wanted: not the power to defeat us in battle, but the power to buy and sell us.

“At any rate, China is the future. We can denounce the authoritarian control freaks who run the place as much as we like, but our criticism is blunted a bit by the way we elect indistinguishable authoritarian control freaks, Republican or Democratic, who have pretty much exactly the same notion of what constitutes successful government. As the world becomes more and more interconnected, the more controlling governments will dictate the terms of those connections, and the developed nations will look more like China or Singapore. They’ll be prosperous and pleasant to live in, as long as you cooperate. And if you refuse to cooperate and get beaten to a pulp by the secret police, most of the people around you won’t have much sympathy, because their lives are prosperous and pleasant.”

On Magic Legalism

“He says the income tax is unconstitutional,” I was explaining, “and he says he can prove it. But I have to admit I couldn’t follow some of his argument.”

“You were dealing with an exponent of what I call ‘magic legalism,'” Mr. Magundi said. “Without really even thinking about it, the magic legalist sees the law, not as an expression of the intent of the legislator, but as an incantation. If a jot or a tittle of the incantation is out of place, it loses its effect. So, when he is dissatisfied with a law, the magic legalist looks for a way, not to change the law, but to break the spell. The income tax is a perfect example: Congress intended to amend the Constitution to allow an income tax, and the state legislatures intended to approve such an amendment; but the magic legalist imagines that he has found some flaw in the process, and therefore the spell is broken, or rather the incantation was never effective in the first place. Fortunately most sane courts take the position that, barring egregious errors, the obvious intent of the legislators is a guide in interpreting the law. Otherwise, if any act of Congress could be voided by a single misprint, then—well—have I talked myself into a corner here?”

On Legislation

“It’s so long that no one has any idea what’s in it,” Mr. Bates concluded. “How would you fix that, Magundi?”

“I agree with you completely,” Mr. Magundi replied. “When our legislators are voting on legislation that none of them have actually read, and in fact not one of them could possibly have read, the system is plainly broken. But a simple constitutional amendment would take care of it. Congress shall make no law encompassing more than five thousand words in English, including any preambles whatsoever. There. I’ve fixed it. Now all you have to do is get that through Congress and thirty-eight of the states, and we’re done.”

On Our Prison Population

“Big deal,” Mr. Bates replied. “So we have a higher percentage of our population behind bars. But that’s where those people deserve to be. Do the crime, do the time.”

“You must have a shockingly low opinion of our country,” Mr. Magundi said, “if you think Americans are more likely to be wicked than people of every other civilized nation. As a patriot, I find your attitude more than a little offensive. You’re lucky I’m a peaceable sort of patriot, instead of one of those patriots with baseball bats. But still, if I were you, I’d refrain from bad-mouthing my country in mixed company.”

On Fundamentalism

“But we have to do something to clamp down on fundamentalism, don’t we?” I said.

“I think we need to think of fundamentalism—Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Maoist or whatever—as something like coal gas or tornadoes,” Mr. Magundi replied. “It’s a force that exists. It shouldn’t blow up or blow down and kill a bunch of innocent people, but it will given half a chance. There’s no use saying there shouldn’t be tornadoes in Oklahoma; there are, and that’s life, and we just have to make the best of it. We have to build our houses with shelters so that the tornadoes will blow over without killing us. And when they do blow over, we have to be ready to pick up the rubble and shrug and say, ‘Well, that’s the way it goes.’ In the future we may be able to mitigate the force of the weather, and we may be able to mitigate the force of fundamentalism. But I have a suspicion that, if we try, we’ll botch both jobs terribly, and make a bigger mess than the one we were trying to clean up.”