Expanded Universe (65 page)

I can't disagree with the even-steven rule . . . but my reason for thinking that Dr. Gabriel's solution will not work is this:

A lottery, even meticulously fair,
cannot
make a man willing to charge a machine-gun nest in the face of almost certain death. That sort of drive comes from emotional sources. Esprit de corps and patriotism
cannot
be drawn in a lottery.

Conscription works (among free men) only when it is not needed. I have seen two world wars; we used the draft in each . . . but in each case it was a means of straightening out the manpower situation; it was
not
needed to make men fight. Both wars were popular.

Since then we have had two non-Wars—Korea and Nam—in "peacetime" and using conscript troops.
And each non-War was a scandalous disaster.
 

I don't have a neat solution to offer. If the American people have lost their willingness to fight and die for their country, the defect cannot be cured by conscription. Unless this emotional condition changes (and I do not know how to change it), we are whipped no matter what weapons we build. It could be overnight, or it could continue to be a long slow slide downhill over many years—ten, twenty, thirty. But the outcome is the same. Unless
something
renews the spirit this country once had, we are in the terminal stages of decay; history is ending for us.

Our foreign masters might graciously let us keep our flag, even our national name. But "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" will be dead.

The Winter of '23–'24 I paid a street vendor 5¢ for a five billion mark German note and I paid too much; 5,000,000,000 DM was worth a trifle over 1¢. A bit later it was worth nothing.

In 1955 at the foot of the Acropolis I bought a small marble replica of the Venus of Melos for 10,000 drachma. I wasn't cheated; that was 3.50 USA.

There are the British pound, the Turkish lira, the Italian lira, the Mexican peso, and several others; all mean one pound of silver. Look up "exchange" and "commodities" in your newspaper; grab your pocket calculator and see how much each is inflated.

When I was a child of four or five my brothers and I used great stacks of hundred-dollar bills as play money. Confederate—

After two centuries, "Not worth a continental," still means "worthless." Memory is long for the damage done by inflation.

Before paper "money" was invented, inflation was accomplished by adding base metal to silver and/or gold while retaining the name of the coin. By this means the Roman denarius was devalued to zero during the first three centuries A.D. But inflation did not start with Caesar Augustus. In the early days of the Republic before the Punic Wars the cash unit was the libra (libra = lb.—pound = 273 grams, or about 60% of our pound avoirdupois, 454 grams). That's too large a unit for daily retail use; it was divided into 12 unciae (ounces).

A "lb." of silver was called an "as." 1/12 of that, struck as coinage, made efficient currency. Now comes war and inflation—

Eventually the "as"—once a pound of silver—was so debased that it amounted to a penny, more or less. Augustus, by decree, went back on a silver/gold standard and created the denarius, 3.87 grams of fine silver. He made 25 denarii equal in value to one aureus (7.74 grams of gold), or a ratio of 12.5 to one. ("Free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one!" The Great Commoner and the august Emperor had similar notions about hard currency.)

One Augustan denarius equalled in gold at today's London fix ($385/troy ounce) a nominal $3.83, or about 3/10 of a gram of gold. This tells us nothing about purchasing power; it simply says that the Augustan denarius was a solid silver coin almost the size and weight of the solid silver quarter we used to have before the government foisted on us those sandwich things. How much olive oil or meal that would buy in Rome around 1 A.D. can be estimated from surviving records—but all the gold in Rome could not buy an aspirin tablet or a paper of matches. No way to compare. And hard money was not supplemented by printed money, bank checks, and transactions that take place entirely inside computers—but I can't go into how those phenomena affect purchasing power without writing a book twice as long as this one on fiscal theory (which I am quite willing to do but nobody would buy it).

What Augustus did was to stabilize Rome's money by defining it in terms of two commodities, each intrinsically valuable, each stable in supply, each almost indestructible, and he defined also the legal ratio between the two coinages—an effort to circumvent Gresham's Law, unknown then but Augustus appears to have had a gut feeling for it. (Not Bill Gresham—the other one. Thomas Gresham.) But a bimetallic standard has its problems; the free economy ratio tends to drift away from the legal ratio, and Gresham's Law begins to work. But this happens very slowly with hard money and is not the disaster that printing-press inflation is, or the debasing of hard money.

Caesar Augustus died in 14 A.D.

His corpse was hardly cold before the vultures got to work. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero—even Claudius did nothing to stop the robbery. Titus attempted an Augustan return to honest money in 80 A.D. but he died in September the following year; his successor was a disaster even as Caesars go.

"Put not your trust in Princes." Debasement of the currency continued under every Caesar for the next two centuries. Diocletian (reign: 294–305) inherited a worthless denarius; he returned Rome to the bimetallic standard at a level barely below that of Augustus. But he increased enormously the bureaucracy, instituted the harshest of taxation to pay for his "reforms," and decreed price-fixing—which worked just as it always does.

On his retirement (not assassination[!]) debasement was resumed while taxes stayed high, and Rome was on the skids. The decline and fall of the denarius and of Rome paralleled each other.

I'm tempted to discuss France's incredible inflation and collapse thereof during the French Revolution (and three more French inflations since then), and the inflations of several other countries in other centuries. But they are monotonously alike and differ from debasement primarily in the fact that the invention of paper "money" permits the corruption of legal tender to get utterly out of hand before the people notice it. In Germany in the early twenties people used to take wheelbarrows to the grocery store—not to fetch back groceries but to carry money to the grocer. But the early stages of disastrous inflation feel like "prosperity." Wages and profits go up, old debts are easier to pay off, business booms.

It is not until later that most people notice that prices and taxes have gone up faster than wages and profits, and that it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet.

There is a strong emotional feeling that "a dollar is a dollar." (Hitler called it, "Mark is Mark!") But you can reexamine it in terms of prices on bread, or how many minutes to earn a dollar. And don't forget taxes! If you aren't working at least the first three months of each year to pay taxes before you can keep one dollar for yourself, then you are on welfare, one way or another. You may not think you are taxed that much—paycheck deductions and hidden taxes are extracted under anesthesia. Try dividing the Federal Budget by the number of wage earners
not on the public payroll,
then take a stab at where you fit in. Don't forget the same process for state, county, and city. There are Makers, Takers, and Fakers, no fourth category, and today the Takers and the Fakers outnumber (and outvote) the Makers.

Today it takes more dollars each year to service the National Debt than the total budget for the last and most expensive year of the Korean War. I am not going to state here the amount of our National Debt. If you have not heard it recently, you wouldn't believe me. If you don't know, telephone your Congressman and ask; he has a local office near you. If the telephone information service can't (won't) tell you, the city room of
any
newspaper does know his number.

Our National Debt will
never
be paid. We are beyond the point of no return. Inflation will continue and get worse . . . and the elderly on fixed incomes and the young adults trying to start families will continue to bear the brunt.

Every congressman, every senator, knows precisely what causes inflation . . . but can't (won't) support the drastic reforms to stop it because it could (and probably would) cost him his job. I have no solution and only one piece of advice:

Buy a wheelbarrow.

Having been reared in the most bigoted of Bible Belt fundamentalism in which every word of the King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God—then having broken loose at thirteen when I first laid hands on
The Origin of Species
and
The Descent of Man
—I should have been unsurprised by the anti-intellectual and anti-science ground swell in this country.

I knew that our American temperament, practical as sharp tools on one side, was never more than three quarters of an inch from mindless hysteria on the other side. I
knew
this—my first long story was "If This Goes On—", a yarn based on the assumption that my compatriots were capable of throwing away their dearly-bought liberties to submit to a crude and ridiculous religious dictatorship.

(In forty years of letters about that story no one has ever criticized this assumption; I infer that I am not alone in believing it.)

I had read much about the Ku Klux Klan during the Tragic Era, talked with many who had experienced it, then experienced its nationwide recrudescence in the early 1920's. I had seen damfoolishness from dance marathons to flagpole sitters, and had made considerable study of crowd behavior and mass delusions. I had noted, rather casually, the initial slow growth of anti-science-&-intellect-ism.

Yet the durned thing shocked me.

Let me list some signs:

a) I CHING;

b) Back-to-nature cults;

c) The collapse of basic education;

d) The current respectability of natal horological astrology among "intelligentsia"—e.g. professors, N.Y. lit'rary people, etc.;

e) "Experts" on nuclear power and nuclear weapons who know nothing whatever of mathematical physics and are smug in admitting it;

f) "Experts" on the ecology of northern Alaska who have never been there and are not mathematically equipped to analyse a problem in ecology;

g) People who watch television several hours a day and derive all their opinions therefrom—and expound them;

h) People who watch television several hours a day;

i) The return of creationism—"Equal time for Yahweh";

j) The return of witchcraft.

The mindless yahoos, people who think linearly like a savage instead of inductively or deductively, and people who used to be respectful to learned opinion or at least kept quiet, now are aggressively on the attack. Facts and logic don't count; their intuition is the source of "truth."

If any item on the above list strikes you as rational, I won't debate it with you; you are part of the problem.

But I will illustrate what I mean in categories where I think I might be misunderstood.

a)
I CHING
—easier than "reading the augurs" but with nothing else to recommend it. Chinese fortune cookies are just as as accurate—and you get to eat the cookie. Nevertheless this bit of oriental nonsense is treated with solemn seriousness by many "educated" people. It is popular enough to make profitable the sale of books, equipment, magazine articles, and personal instruction. Paralleling I CHING is the widespread use of Tarot cards. Fortunetelling by cards used to be a playful parlor game, a mating rite—a nubile girl limited by the vocabulary and public manners of the Mauve Decade could convey to a rutty young male almost any message by how she chose to "read his fortune"—with no impropriety. But neither he nor she took the cards seriously.

Tarot cards formerly were used only by Gypsy or fake-Gypsy fortunetellers; they were not an article of commerce, were not easy to find. Today they are as easy to buy as liquor during prohibition, and also books on their "interpretation." Reading the Tarot is taken with deep seriousness by a dismaying number of people—having the Hanging Man turn up can cause great anguish.

b)
Back-to-nature cults:
I do
not
mean nudist resorts or "liberated" beaches. The growing realization that human bodies are not obscene is a sane, healthy counter trend in our crazy culture. By back-to-nature cults I mean people who band together to "return to the land" to grow their own food without pesticides, without artificial fertilizers, without power machinery, self-reliant in all ways . . . but with no comprehension that a spading fork implies coal mines, iron ore, blast furnaces, steel mills, factories, etc., that any building more complex than a log cabin or a sod house implies a building-materials industry, etc.

If all of us tried to go back-to-nature, most of us would starve rather quickly. These back-to-nature freaks can't do arithmetic.

c) The collapse of basic education—no need to repeat.

d)
Natal horological astrology
—Baseline: fifty-odd years ago astrology was commonly regarded as a ridiculous former superstition, one all but a tiny minority had outgrown. It is now the orthodoxy of many, possibly a majority. This pathological change parallels the decay of public education.

Stipulated: Ancient astrologers were scientists in being able to predict certain aspects of descriptive astronomy such as eclipses, positions of the sun, moon, and naked-eye planets, etc. Whether or not they believed the fortunetelling they supplied to their kings, patrons, or clients is irrelevant. The test of a science is its ability to predict; in the cited phenomena the Chaldean priests (for example) performed remarkable feats of prediction with handcrafted naked-eye instruments.

It has long been known that Sol is the heat engine that controls our weather. Recently, with the discovery of solar wind, the Van Allen belts, et al., we have become aware of previously unsuspected variables affecting us and our weather, and successful predictions are being made empirically—no satisfactory theory.