Yesterday I posted about how one's political opinions are often based more on emotion that on logic and reason. It's not fair to generalize unless you admit you're part of the generalization. It's at least partially true for me. I remember, for example, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, it was the 1980s, definitely the least cool decade since the 1910s (20s-Fitzgerald, flappers, wealth, sex. 30s-jazz, gangsters, rad politics. 40s-WWII, The Big One. 50s-Elvis, rock´n´roll, the Beats. 60s-hippies, rock, sex. 70s-hedonism, partying, Me Decade. 80s-Huey Lewis and Hall and Oates. Like a really uncool Fifties. With ugly clothes. And AIDS. 90s-let's all get cyber-rich and be BoBos. Hedonism unseen since the 20s. 00s-decadence? Another Seventies?) Now, I'm a nice middle-class suburban guy; my folks are from Texas but we lived in several different suburbs around the United States. The suburbs in the '80s were stifling compared to what you young pups have now.

I mean, in Kansas City in 1984 we didn't have Internet and barely had cable TV. You still watched the Big Three networks because there wasn't much else, ESPN and CNN and MTV and the Braves and Cubs games and HBO, which wasn't worth what little extra it cost. There were two art house cinemas in town, the Tivoli and the Fine Arts. Each had one screen. There were still more porno movie theaters in town--video has killed off the porno movie theater, fortunately, unless you're Pee-Wee Herman--than art houses. It was really cool to sneak into the Old Chelsea, by the way. I never had the guts to try. I bet nobody else did, either. We had VCRs but there weren't too many good movies available on video. Home computers then couldn't do a damned thing. We still used typewriters to type up our term papers. Video games were cool. It was a big deal to be good at, like, Defender. We had Ataris to play extremely rudimentary video games at home.

We actually went to high school football games and dances. We could get beer really easily because back then it was 18 for 3.2 beer in Kansas, and people would swill it by the bucket. We had no moral compunctions about driving around drunk out of our skulls, either. I'm amazed we didn't all get killed or, worse, kill somebody else. It was really hard to get pot, though. That was something that you didn't often get our hands on. None of us smoked cigarettes, anyway, so we didn't really know how to smoke pot--it wasn't cool at all, it was very redneck or greaser, what those cowboys and auto-shop dudes over at West would do. It was cool to dress prep. People actually said, seriously, "I'm not prep because I never wear Polo over Izod." Whatever that was. I never caught on. And those sweaters with the diamonds on them.

Being into Zep and Floyd and the Who was having good musical taste, one cut above the jokers who thought Foreigner and Styx and Journey were kick-ass. "Rock the Casbah" was the absolute most radical thing played on any radio station, and if it didn't get on the radio, we didn't hear about it. The Violent Femmes were terribly avant-garde then. The Police were considered to be the best major band by high-schoolers; real hipsters might get into the Talking Heads. U2 and REM were just coming out. If you'd heard of the Dead Kennedys you were an out-and-out punker. I was kind of an intellectual kid (I was one of the elite fifty or so on the honors track, which they were still allowed to have back then) and I was into Bob Dylan and Van Morrison big-time, which let me put on intellectual airs. It wasn't cool to listen to black music--Michael Jackson didn't break that taboo because he was so obviously a weirdo. I remember when Prince came out with his Purple Rain album, which was considered shocking; he'd already done "Little Red Corvette" and "1999", which broke through to rock radio. I was listening to Purple Rain at a high-school party at some girl's house in 1984 and "Raspberry Beret" came on and I thought it was cool and said so and my friend George told me, quite earnestly, that it wasn't and that I didn't really like it. It didn't become cool to listen to rap until Aerosmith did "Walk This Way" with Run-DMC in 1986, and it didn't really become accepted until the Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys.

It was fun. I don't regret it. It was really stifling, though. If you were in high school between 1980 and 1984, your teachers were mostly about forty, which means that they had a 1950s attitude. (The sixties didn't get to Kansas until about 1973.) And that was a pain in the ass because the good ones had no problem getting respect, and we had a lot of good ones, but we also had a lot of bad ones who got by with old-style rigid discipline. That's not allowed now. The predominating attitude you were surrounded by, parents and churches and neighbors and teachers (my folks were pretty good; it's some other people's folks who were repressive), chafed. The Religious Right was just beginning to flex its muscles, and they stood for everything--authority pushing people around, especially, and those goddamn phony silly-smiling "Don't y'all jist luuuv Jaysis" overly-made-up real-estate-agent Republican moms at the goddamn church--that just made me want to puke. (All us Dylan-listening intellectuals actually took The Catcher in the Rye seriously. I thought I was cool because we got assigned Catch-22 senior year and I was the only one who figured it out. I still love that book. But I now know that if I got it back when I was 18, then it's not really that deep.)

The other thing about the 80s was the fear of nuclear war. You pups under the age of about 25 don't remember the fear of us all getting killed in a nuclear war that we all had back in the 1980s. They assigned us to read Alas, Babylon, a very bad nuclear war novel, I suppose because it was relevant. That was the time of the uncertainty in the Kremlin between Brezhnev and Gorbachov, and people still thought the Soviet Union was a huge, dangerous power that might take us over or try to or threaten to nuke us or nuke us by accident. There were movies like The Day After and War Games and also Red Dawn, and Time published endless stories about the Salt talks and throwweights and MIRVs. We all had nightmares about getting blown up in a nuclear war. You missed out on that, fortunately. We had nuclear drills in school, once a year. Just like fire drills and tornado drills.

This led me, and many of us, to be scared out of our skins and to prefer appeasement to confrontation. I spent the whole decade of the 80s as an appeaser and a pacifist because I was scared shitless of the Soviet Union. Now, I was aware that the Soviet Union was a very nasty dictatorship, and I had to find some way to rationalize my natural sympathy for the victims of Soviet rule with my fear of the government that oppressed them. You see, I got picked on pretty badly when I was in the ninth grade. I didn't know how to deal with a confrontation. I therefore chickened out disgracefully and became widely despised, and it was a good thing we moved away from that place because it would have gone on, I'm sure of that. Since then, though, I have always identified very strongly with the victim of aggression.

I somehow had to reconcile that sympathy for the victim with my pro-appeasement feelings, which came from fear. I therefore decided that the Soviet Union was not really all that awful. I couldn't stand for it to be a cruel dictatorship that imprisoned and tortured its people, so I made myself believe it wasn't one. An act of self-deception that great carries all kinds of intellectual consequences. If the Soviet Union wasn't so bad, then Marxism couldn't be too bad either. In fact, maybe, it could be right. And if the Soviets aren't so bad and Marxism isn't so false, then the United States, who opposes them, must be bad. It must be the aggressive provoker that molests the Soviets, who just need to defend themselves so they can carry out their revolution. Why hadn't the revolution been successful yet, I asked, and I answered that it was because the bad US and the capitalists and the power brokers were interfering with it because they wanted to keep their big houses and fancy cars and also their power over other countries. Who are these specific power brokers, I should have asked. Name them. But I didn't ask that. It was so easy for me to run and hide inside the sheltering conspiracy theory.

Now, once you assume the United States is bad, all kinds of things follow if your ideas are in any way coherent. Vietnam--a cynical attempt to impose capitalism on the Vietnamese people. Chile--we did it for the phosphate mines, not because we feared that by about '76 Allende would become Fidel II. If we did it at all. Israel--we support them to keep the Arabs down. Cuba--Castro loves his people and gives them health care and schools. Our nuclear weapons--dismantle them, they provoke the Soviets. Besides, really, the US Army exists to keep the American people down. Marcos and Somoza and Batista and Pinochet and the Shah of Iran--evil despots with bloody hands who we propped up in order to keep their peoples enslaved. Kennedy and King--they were killed because they were dangerous to the power structure. (What's the power structure?, I didn't ask myself.)

So how did I get over this? Well, I came to live in Spain in 1987. I'd been a Spanish major in college and my leftist teachers--all Spanish departments in the USA are Latin American hard left--had filled me full of Diego Rivera and Che Guevara and García Lorca and José Martí and Pablo Neruda and the like, which I'd absorbed in a half-baked melange. And I'd read all about the Spanish Civil War and, of course, I was wildly for the Republic in its struggle against fascism. Then I got here and I believed what I read in the newspapers, especially in El País.

But then a few things happened. I started reading George Orwell, not just 1984 and Animal Farm, but his essays, and I was knocked over by his clear and questioning style. I now know that Orwell was full of faults; he claimed to be logical and rational yet was full of absurd prejudices, and much of his journalism, espceially the As I Please columns, is crap. He never got over being convinced that Socialism could work, and, in fact, that it would eventually win out. Orwell died a convinced Marxist. And I think this is what helped me understand something; this guy's a Marxist, so he must be good, I believed. Yet he questions orthodoxy both on the left and on the right (on the left only up to a certain point). He asks critical questions about what people write, and he made me begin to think critically about what I read. It took a while, but I tried to think like Orwell. Eventually, of course, I began to use Orwell's techniques of critical reading. I figured I'd gone through a stage on the way to my thinking black belt (not there yet, don't pretend to be) when I began to read Orwell himself critically and discovered how full of crap he sometimes was.

One of the books I read was Homage to Catalonia, in which Orwell criticizes both the Communists and the Francoists. (He does not criticize the Anarchists or Trotskyists, with whom he served.) I saw that Communism was, unquestionably, bad in Spain. That caused me to read other books, more in depth and more historically correct than Orwell's, on the subject. I came to know a good bit about the Spanish Civil War and I decided that the Left was actually even more mendacious than the Right in Spain, if that's possible. Then all of Marxism came crashing down.

I read several books on economics, including two by Milton Friedman, and realized after a good bit of thought that Adam Smith's original model of the free market is the way economics actually works, whether you like it or not. Marx was as wrong as Lamarck and should be taken no more seriously. Every time one of Marx's theories has been put into practice, it hasn't worked. So I added that to my little bag of intellectual weaponry and started asking this question: "How much do we have to futz around with the free market in order to make policy X work?" every time I read something. I discovered that if the answer was "Not much", then the policy is more or less sound, and if the answer is "A lot", then it probably isn't.

This led me to examine the Constitution closely and think for a while about rights, and I decided that the three basic human rights were life, liberty, and property. Killing people is wrong and you shouldn't do it. Can we say you shouldn't do it ever? If there's a man with a gun in his hand threatening you, do you let him shoot you? I decided that you shoot him first if you can. Therefore the right to life is not absolute. Where does it stop? When you threaten someone else's basic human rights. You can't do that, and if we catch you violating someone else's human rights, we'll make you stop. If you won't stop, we'll use violence. And if we have to kill you, we will.

Who is "we"? Well, "we" is "We the People". That's all of us within the boundaries of our country. I decided that the system of laws which apply to everyone equally is necessary to preserve everyone's rights. You can't kill me, and if you try to, you must be punished. You can't interfere with my freedom, and if you try, you should be punished. (Corollary: Slavery is always, absolutely, wrong, because it's a restriction of freedom. Prison is acceptable because violators of others' rights are punished by the loss of their freedom, and the laws, administered by an independent judiciary, are what determine what is a violation of others' rights and what isn't. How do we decide on the laws? We, or our elected representatives, vote on them. That is why they are legitimate; we have all agreed on them. Can they be changed? Sure, but it's dangerous. Don't do it if you don't have to. Especially don't do it on a whim.) Anyway, you can't take my property, either. And I can't do any of these things to you. We agree to leave disputes between us to be administered peacefully by a judge, and we agree that people who go outside the laws to kill, enslave, or steal must be stopped and if necessary killed or punished.

So how do we stop those people who kill, enslave, or steal? Well, we need a system of social protection, a police force to defend us from those within our society who violate others' rights and a military to defend us from those outside said society who want to violate our rights--we, as a society, have the right to life (to continue existing), to liberty (to make our own decisions), and to property (to do what we want to with our stuff), besides our right as individuals to all of those things. Those forces must act within the laws if our society is to function. They must be under the authority of both the people, as voters, and by the independent judiciary.

This piece is getting way too long. If you guys want me to, I'll keep going tomorrow. If not, I'll stop philosophizing.