Where in the World? R. Bradford

I have asked it also of a good many much-traveled friends who are of conservative persuasion, like me; and after an initial star tled look that fades fast into thoughtfulness, they invariably give me the same reply: Nowhere. There is something significant in this, for the world has many beautiful and interesting places. It has heen my own privilege in the past dozen years or so to visit 42 countries of this wobbly world, some of them several times. Near ly all offered features that I liked: Mr. Bradford is well known as a writer, speak er, and business organization consultant. He now lives in Ocala, Florida . ...tOA the people, the climate, the scen ery, the music, the language, the food - something good. There is hardly a land I have visited that does not occupy a warm corner in my memory. I think of them often. England - vast, noisy London, the smoky midlands, the lovely lakes, the fine people. Scotland the ruined abbeys, the Trossachs, and especially the Castle glooming over the reeking chimney pots of "Edinbur-r-ry" in a misty twi light. Italy - not the highly organ ized Tourist Trap, but the rugged home of a fascinating people.

Greece ... palimpsest of the ages. Thailand, country of fabricated, fragile beauty. Argentina, south ern twin of the United States. Chile, the Italy of the New World. - You name it, and I'll love it ... for some fondly remembered thing: a white cone of mountain rising from a misty lake - like 1968 WHERE IN THE WORLD? 485 Osorno ... or Fuji; a sea-pierced gorge, like the Kotar Gulf of Yugo slavia; the mighty gash of the Corinth Canal; a glimpse of the Corcovado Christ looming through the clouds high over Rio; a fisher man's dinner beside the Tagus in Lisbon; a surprising bit of wine, like the Tsara of Baalbek or the resin-flavored Retsin of Argolis; or maybe a simple act of human kindness - as when the young Scotch woman who shared our compartment south to Keswick, seeing that we were much bur dened with baggage and no por ters at hand, left her baby on the seat and came trudging down the corridor after us, lugging one of our heavy bags!

Yes, always there is some good or beautiful or gracious thing to remember. Always, or nearly al ways, I would like to go back. But to live? Which country would I choose above my own? And the ans\ver is: none. Liter ally, none. Partly, I suppose, this is due to the love, the accustomed to-your-face feeling that we all have for our native place. We are somewhat like O. Henry's Cosmop olite, who was largely and mag nificently tolerant of the whole world - until somebody happened to disparage the two-by-four vil lage in which he had lived as a boy. But aside from such geographic preferences and nostalgic preju dices (I ask myself, and of late I ask my friends) - aside from all that, think it over carefully, and say which country you would pre fer to the United States as a place in which to live. I have yet to find an American who said he would choose to live elsewhere. I know there are such, expatriates by choice, for one reason or another that seems good to them - but I have never met them.

A Disturbing Trend The occasion for these musings is this: For a good many years I have been concerned with the di rection my country is going. Like many other Americans, I have been opposed on principle to the idea of a deficit economy, not he cause I worry about an occasional year in the red (which is ordinary experience in business and even in private, domestic life) but be cause I have seen the devastation that can be wrought by an ex tended application of the fatuous spend-borrow-and-never-pay aber ration. It is easy to list a number of modern nations whose middle class - the saving and investing element that provides much of the capital for industrial and other development - has been sold into loss and bankruptcy by that fatal philosophy. When I see my nation headed the same way, I protest, I 486 THE FREEMAN August cry out, I argue-I even denounce. I get all hot under the collar! And so do a lot of other people who share my conservative views on the philosophical, as well as the fiscal, need for solvency in our national affairs. And we get all the hotter when left-wing devotees of progress-through-inflation ac cuse us of being "concerned only with money" - as though we had neither fiscal sense, political wis dom, nor social vision!

As a result, we become easy targets for the scornful shafts of the disciples of debt, compulsion, and superstatism, who call them selves "liberals." They accuse us of wanting a "static" economy, of looking backward, and especially of being always against things, never for anything. All this, of course, is a lot of nonsense. We have a positive,not a negative, program. We are for a number of things that are fundamental to the long-term welfare and safety of all the people. We want the economy to be active and healthy; we want production and employ ment; we want everybody to earn and save and invest and enjoy se curity and comfort. We want the American dream, as expressed in the American Constitution, to be fully realized in the prosperity, the freedom, and the progress of the American people. We believe that the Constitution provides both the safeguards and the opportuni ties for such progress; but if, in our developing society, conditions arise that were not foreseeable when the Constitution was writ ten, then we want the Constitu tion amended by the process pro vided, and not nullified by bureau cratic manipulation or set aside by judicial dictate.

The Need for Law and Order We believe that ,vhen Congress was empowered to coin money and "regulate the value thereof," it was intended that the value of that money should be protected and maintained, and not dimin ished or destroyed, and that it is the present duty of Congress to thwart, rather than aid and abet, those policies and persons that are systematically undermining the strength of our currency, and thereby lessening the security of our people. We believe that "law and order" is something more than a phrase. Life and liberty can be realized and protected only in a society that has adopted rules for its con duct, and for the conduct of the people who are members of that society and live under its form of government. We are not interested in punishment or retribution as ends· in themselves. We are con tent, indeed, we desire, that jus tice shall be tempered with mercy 1968 WHERE IN THE WORLD? 487 - a humane concept that is pretty well guaranteed by our jury sys tem. Few indeed are those who look upon law enforcement as a mere matter of vengeance. But no society can long continue unless its laws are enforced; the alterna tive is anarchy and the destruc tion of social and political values that have been the foundation of that society. Therefore, when we see the laws openly disobeyed in the name of "protest"; when zeal ots for this or that cause announce that they will determine for them selves which laws they will obey and which ones they will flout; when we see riot, arson, and mur der condoned and even defended by high officials of our govern ment, we are appalled, we are angered - and we are frightened.

When we read that a Justice of the Supreme Court, attending a procommunist conference, com pared the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 with the American Revolu tion of 1776 and advocated "force ful revolution" as the only way to correct the "intolerable condi tions" under which he said 85 per cent of the world's people live when we read such things we are outraged - and again, we are frightened. When we read that the High Court, in decision after de cision, seems to show greater con cern for the legal rights of admit ted criminals than it does for the rights of their victims; when we see the Attorney General of the United States, our highest law en forcement officer, go on national television to let the world of riot and arson know that he favors a "soft line" in dealing with their depredations-then, however much we may favor and support the hu man and civil rights which the rioters are pretending to espouse, we begin to ask ourselves what is ultimately going to happen when the law is so weakly regarded and so feebly enforced by those who are hired and paid and sworn to defend it?

Evil Must Be Opposed When year after year goes by with no effective action on the part of government officials to bring expenditures into balance with receipts; when there is a con stant proliferation of the. Federal bureaucracy, always at the ex pense and seldom to the benefit or service of the taxpayer; when we see the idea of compulsion becom ing more and more the main re liance (in everything but law en forcement, that is) of the con trolling political methodology; when we learn to our dismay that nearly 48,000,000 people are now the recipients of regular monthly checks from the state and national governments - confronted with all this, what choice have we but to 488 THE FREEMAN August be negative? How can we avoid being "against" such things? What we are for is a great and growing and free society in which every citizen shall have opportun ity for the highest degree that he can attain of comfort and security.

What we are against are the policies and proj ects and practices that weaken, that jeopardize, and that may destroy that society. And since such destructive policies are being constantly advanced and cleverly promoted, it follows that there is a lot to be against. And we owe nobody an apology for being "against" such things. Indeed, the outcry that conserva tives are always against and never for things is a rather slick device of the radical Left. Unfortunately, many conservatives have let them selves be bamboozled by it. They, too, often say, "Yes - that's a very bad thing - but we can't say so. We mustn't be negative!" To be negative has come to be a kind of public relations sin. It sounds better to be "for" things; it seems positive and affirmative - and these, in current semantics, are "good" words. By an extension of this never-be-negative logic, if you were to learn that I planned to burglarize your house, you shouldn't do anything so negative as to notify the police and get me into the clutches of the law.

Dear me, no - that would mean you were against something! It would be negative! Your proper procedure would be either to keep still, or else to offer a positive alternate suggestion - such as that I should rob your neighbor's house, instead. Or better yet, that I should rob a bank, which might help in effecting a much-needed redistribution of the money which the bank had (no doubt, wickedly) amassed! Reviewing the Ideal So much for a few of the things we are against. So much for the central vision that we are for. And so much, in brief and perhaps inadequate declaration, for the reasons that impel us to our faith, and to our espousal of what we believe are the necessary condi tions for freedom and progress. But there is a danger in such advocacy. We hear much these days of alienation, the scholar's term for a sense of rejection, of not belonging. We, too, we who warn of danger, are threatened with a kind of alienation - of sep aration from the dream, from the political and socio-economic struc ture, that is our nation! When we see so much that may injure, and that is injuring, that nation, so much that we know is wrong and dangerous, we are apt, all unconsciously and without intent, to make a fatal substitution - the 1968 WHERE IN THE WORLD? 489 thing contained for the container; the bad policies about our country for the country itself. "They" are doing so many things that are economically dangerous and mor ally indefensible that in our com plete withdrawal from them we are in danger of separating our selves, imaginatively, from the physical territory, the political government, the economic struc ture and the social concept that is the United States of America. And this would be suicidal - for us, I mean; for it would convert us into emotionally stateless. persons; and without the spur of patriotism -though it is no longer fashion able, and in some quarters is con sidered bad taste to use the word - without its stimulus our lives, and especially our efforts to pre serve freedom, would have little purpose.

After all, why do we concern ourselves over inflation, or crime, or injustice, or bureaucracy ram pant, or the trend toward compul sion and the lessening of freedom? Is it because we love liberty? Yes, of course - but it is also because we love our country! Oh, we are no longer mere jingoistic patriots. We are capable of self-analysis and self -cri ticism. We do not think our country has always been flawless. Our statesmen have made grave blunders. Our policies have often been unwise. We have been, on the whole, a somewhat violent people. In common with other in dustrial nations, we went through our period of exploitation. We know all that. But we know, too, that our transgressions have been no worse than those of contem porary nations. Like most of them, the American people and the American State were the product of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with all that this im plies in the way of nobility - and venali ty. We can lay the record of our country alongside that of any other great power, confident that we shall come off well in the comparison. If this is not a basis for pride, neither is it an occasion for shame; and our current critics in England, France, and Germany, not to mention Sweden and Switz erland, may please take notice.

So Much to Approve But at the mere suggestion of our "alienation" from the United States, theoretical speculation abruptly ceases and we face facts: One, we are inseparable from the United States, physically and emo tionally. Two, we wouldn't live else,vhere if we could. Three, squirm and wriggle as we may over admitting to emotionalism, we love our country! And we love it, aside from habit and the com pulsion of instinctive filial devo tion, because it is still, despite all 490 THE FREEMAN August we have done to stifle initiative, the land of opportunity. With all the ridiculous and hampering re strictions we have placed in the way of individual growth and develop ment, it is still the land of the free. The picture of America, as presented to the world and to us Americans, by the press, televi sion, books, the theater and the movies, has been a sadly distorted one. If you read current best selling books or look at top-rated movies, you will get the impres sion of an America of free love, sex deviation, self-indulgence, and violence. If you follow TV news releases you see only violence mobs, marches, "protests," riots, arson, looting. But these things are not normal. The very fact that they are not normal is what, un der the code of the newsmen, makes them newsworthy!

The Path to Progress Consider riots. (And let it be here recorded that the writer of this article is a supporter of the rights of all minorities, and is against discrimination because of race or religion. He is also a long time advocate of slum elimination, both as a humanitarian measure and a social and economic neces sity.) Well, the riots have been bad and bloody. But what is the obverse of their gloomy medallion? On the one hand, you see fire, smashed windows, looted stores, flaming Molotov cocktails, screams of hatred - a grim and ghastly pic ture. That is the dark side - the side that is flaunted to the world. But in all the cities where racial rioting occurred, not more than a few thousand persons took part. The participating \vhites, of course, were negligible in relation to the total white population. But what of the Negroes '! Surely not more than twenty thousand, all together. A large number of riot ers? Yes - but there are twenty tnillion Negroes in this country!