Do the Right Thing: Die

From capellini at Orso’s to an infinity of darkness.

By David Kahane
http://www.nationalreview.com/
January 28, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

We’re off to a good start. In Chicago, the prosecutor formerly known as Fitzmas has just subpoenaed a boatload of the beloved BO2’s closest buddies and aides to testify in l’affaire Blagojevich. A full 43—count ’em, 43!—subpoenas, including ones for the mighty David “the Press Conference Rag” Axelrod; the lady from Shiraz, Iran, Valerie Jarrett; the man from Aleppo, Syria, Tony Rezko; and Rahmbo himself. Neither the Grant nor the Harding nor even the Clinton administration can make such a claim to inherent, systemic, Chicago Combine corruption. Eat your heart out, Ulysses S., Warren Gamaliel, and Billy Jeff Blythe III!

Then there’s the “stimulus package,” an income-transfer program from the suckers, er, the taxpayers, to banks, General Motors, and lawyers across this great land of ours, a bailout of such gigantic proportions that it will make Ayn Rand look like she suffered a profound failure of nerve and imagination when she wrote Atlas Shrugged. And up until last week, we lefties thought she’d been smoking crack when she cooked up the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Act! Who knew she was a do-the-right-thing prophet?

Even better, Pres. B. Hussein Obama Jr., fresh off his first official presidential interview with Al-Arabiya, has already begun to experience the joys of the executive order—“Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool,” in Paul Begala’s felicitous phrase. No more torture! No more Gitmo! Abortion services to the world! I don’t know about you, but I’m already planning my trip to the Netherlands for Geert Wilders’s hate-speech trial, and I expect to be showered with free hashish, hookers, and hijabs now that we Americans can hold our heads up in the world again. All this plus a call to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed under the right-wing nut . . . er, the Clinton administration.

Not to mention this helpful, budget-saving tip from the Grandmother of the Year, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi, the pride of Baltimore and the sage of San Francisco, whose blink-free brain just deposited this pearl of wisdom upon the body politic: “Well, the family-planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children’s health, education, and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception—will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.” Speaker Pelosi is like one of those McKinsey & Co. efficiency experts who show up at your employer’s door and explain that he could make more money by firing all his employees and ceasing operations altogether.

That’s the ticket for what ails us—fewer people! In the bad old days, breeders had lots of kids in the hopes that some of them would survive, some would join the army, some would enter the clergy, some would grow up to be Frank Rich, and all would take care of their parents in their dotage. Which began at about age 45. In our new, improved, progressive world, however, children are a net negative. They’re voracious consumers of scarce resources, a luxury we can no longer afford, as likely to grow up to be Britney Spears as Eric Holder. Plus, have you seen how much Harvard’s tuition is these days?

Never mind that the Ponzi scheme known as Social Security has lost some 40 million payroll-tax payers since 1973, along with those would-be citizens’ unborn children, not to mention their unborn grandchildren, who patriotically pre-aborted themselves by choosing an aborted forebear. Good-bye, carbon-based life form native-born Americans, hello Third World immigrants. Speaking personally, I like the idea that the guy I pay four bucks an hour to cut my lawn and clean my pool is going to support me for at least 20 years after I retire from the lucrative profession of screenwriting and lunching at Orso’s.

My wingnut friends, if I had any, which I don’t, would surely call modern progressivism a suicide cult. Reduce your standard of living! Walk to work! Install chemical toilets instead of flush johns! Grow your own damn vegetables! But what do they know? In progresso-world—the world of imaginary psychiatric diseases, endless trauma, unreasoning fears and worries, and a confirmed belief that upon our deaths an infinity of darkness will swallow us up—the greatest of all virtues (even greater than Hope!) is Fairness, followed closely by Tolerance. And the worst sin, the dirtiest word in the English language, is Discrimination. We’d rather die than give offense, and, you have to admit, our existence is an offense in itself.

So go ahead and call us a suicide cult. We prefer to think of ourselves as the saviors of the planet, and what better way to save it than by self-immolation (with the appropriate carbon offsets to combat the resulting air pollution)? If and when the Dear Leader and Teacher, the Mahdi, the Expected One, the Quisatz Haderach, orders us to drink the Kool-Aid of Change, then we will proudly belly up to the bar, quaff l’elisir della morte, and, like the Rev. Jim Jones and his followers at Jonestown, lie down and expire in the loving arms of Gaia.

(By the way, did anybody but my sainted father, “Che” Kahane, find it odd that in Sean Penn’s paean to that seminal American hero, Harvey Milk, there was not a single mention of the mass suicide by the adherents of Jones’s San Francisco–based Peoples Temple in Guyana, even though it dominated the news in Baghdad-by-the-Bay for a full week prior to the murder of Milk and Mayor Moscone? Jonestown happened on Nov. 18, 1978; Harvey and George were killed by Dan White on Nov. 27. Unless I missed it, I guess it didn’t fit the narrative.)

After all, as San Fran Nan says, it’s all about reducing cost, so that “part of what we do for children’s health, education, and some of those elements” is just not to have them. Or kill them. Whichever.

You wouldn’t by any chance know a good death cult, would you?

—David Kahane, luckily for him, was not aborted in the womb. If he were, you couldn’t write to him at kahanenro@gmail.com. But he still feels guilty about it.


— David Kahane is a nom de cyber for a writer in Hollywood. “David Kahane” is borrowed from a screenwriter character in The Player.