THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

You will read many times here my admission that I not only MADE the mistakes I criticize, but I still do and I will do the same thing in the future. If only perfect people gave advice, there wouldn't be any.

I kept jumping all over Shari for APOLOGIZING for her very good opinions. She has quit it, and I have criticized others for the same thing before and since. But it reflects an attitude I had, so I recognize it.

"Who am I to say this?"

In fact, one of the main problems that made the 1960s was THAT attitude. It was the high mark of the loud-mouthed leftist New York Jew. A WASP who had been taught deference would be scared off by a screaming Jew. The kids learned that their obedience-trained World War II fathers had gotten a double dose of this fear of expressing their opinions. So, after watching Bella Abzug and Abbie Hoffman scare off disagreement kids learned that all they had to do was scream and his father would capitulate, fast.

It was the fact that the elders I SHOULD have been able to follow were such wimps that forced me to realize that my Southern reticence had to GO.

In my defense, let me point out that history told me I had a RIGHT to expect my elders to take out those New York Jews themselves. We had taken our state back from Reconstruction. We had taken America from the Indians and built a power. No civilization in history had ever dreamed of. The generation before the WWII wimps had passed the national origins immigration acts in 1921 and 1923.

The white man stood over the world like a Colossus. I had a hard time believing that only ***I*** could see some loud mouths needed standing up to.

From a colossus to a groveling wimp in ONE GENERATION!

The leaders I looked to were all older men, the Harry Byrd types. But no younger men came to stand in their places. It took me YEARS to realize that no one WAS coming and the Old Guard was dying out.

Every time I saw something else incredibly stupid, like the idea that bureaucrats running the economy would be efficient, socialism, I could not BELIEVE that I was the only one who did not see it as intellectualism and idealism, but as obviously pig stupid. I often had that same feeling in Washington when I was sitting (or standing by my boss) in a Committee meeting.

But I was always right and they were always NUTS. This is not an easy thing for a sane man to accept. All one of them had to do was shriek or shout how offended he or some group he said he spoke for was and the Masturbation Generation would go into grovel mode.

One man said that the Kennedy assassination will always seem to be a plot because people look for causes for big events. A little failure like Lee Harvey Oswald could not change the history of the United States. There had to be more to it.

PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME THE STANDARD CRAP ON JFK. I am trying to make a point here.

And the point is illustrated by the italicized words above. What was wrong with socialism, and what ended the Soviet Empire, was that it was SILLY.

That's IT!

What kept it going were CIA growth estimates which are laughable now that we have seen the pitiful ex-USSR economy and were laughable TO ME then. What kept it going was that no one pointed out that Communist countries SHOT escapees. Instead, because of leftist shrieks, we kept feeling guilty about tiny non-Communist tyrannies. Everything THEY said was what WE dealt with.

We are living in the bad dream I understood THEN. But I felt that I MUST be an extremist, that I MUST be missing something. Every extremist position I had is now accepted generally as common sense.

One miserable little generation created this nightmare. PLEASE DO NOT GIVE ME THE STANDARD CRAP ABOUT OTHER GENERATIONS' MISTAKES. They were mistakes, not wimp-outs.

What we are reversing here is a giant wimp-out, a wimp-out that has become a HABIT in two generations.

We must reverse the wimp-out.