Fred Reed's Columns
"When people sense this and decline to vote, we cluck like disturbed hens and speak of apathy. Nope. Just common sense." Column by Fred Reed.
"When I am dictator, I will strap the mothers of the graduating class of Harvard to the front bumpers of Humvees in Baghdad, and see how long support for the war lasts." Column by Fred Reed.
"No country ever lives up to its own PR, but there was a time when America was widely admired. Now, almost universally, it is seen as a rogue state. And is." Column by Fred Reeed.
"Honor is important to militaries, which need to regard themselves as distinguishable from hit men for the Mafia. They aren’t, of course. Both kill people they don’t know on orders from people they don’t know in order to make a living. Is this not literally true?" Column by Fred Reed.
Column by Fred Reed.
"Most of the world detests the United States, yes, for reasons that you can accept or not according to your politics. It isn’t for our cultural or political superiority. Often it is an objection to being bombed." Column by Fred Reed.
" Explain the invasion to the American public in simple moral terms suitable for middle-school children at an evangelical summer camp: We are bombing cities to bring the gift of democracy and American values, or to defeat some vague but frightening evil, perhaps lurking under the bed, or to get rid of a bad dictator no longer of service to us, or to bring freedom and prosperity to any survivors." Column by Fred Reed.
"And so you come out in splendid physical shape and feeling no end manly and they tell you how noble it is to Fight for Your Country. This might be true if anyone were invading the country. But since Washington always invades somebody else, you are actually fighting for Big Oil, or Israel, or the defense industry, or the sexual ambiguities who staff National Review, or the vanity of that moral dwarf on Pennsylvania Avenue." Column by Fred Reed.
"We are ruled by a male cheerleader who favors torture. I wonder what things twist in the inner fog." Column by Fred Reed.
"Career officers, first, are politicians. You don’t get promoted by saying that the higher-ups are otherworldly incompetents. An officer’s loyalty is to his career, and to the officer corps, not to the country or to his troops." Column by Fred Reed.
"In school, low-IQ teachers try to make little boys into girls and expel them if they play soldier and say Bang. Then the Pentagon recruits these transvestite artifacts and sends them off to shoot people they’ve barely heard of. What a plan." Column by Fred Reed.
Julius Streicher, Catharine MacKinnon, Jesse Jackson, And David Duke
"Much of human behavior is templated. Certain kinds of personality do certain things. They can't help it. Common templates are the True Believer, the Hater, and the Victim. The salient point is that the template comes first, the content second and sometimes almost as an afterthought. They are like empty forms waiting to be filled in." Column by Fred Reed.
"How is he going to cause them to rise up in love for us? By massively bombing several hundred places in Iran, killing many thousands of its people, and humiliating them in the eyes of the world. Why, what could make more sense?" Column by Fred Reed.
A Modest Proposal to Abolish Universities
"Perhaps once universities had something to do with the mind, the arts, with reflection, with grasping or grasping at man’s place in a curious universe. No longer. Now they are a complex scam of interlocking directorates. They employ professors, usually mediocre, to sell diplomas, usually meaningless, needed to get jobs nobody should want, for the benefit of corporations who want the equivalent of docile assembly-line workers." Column by Fred Reed.
"Do you want your son to die for—get this—democracy in Iraq? You diapered him, got him through school-yard fist fights, his first prom, graduation from boot camp, and he comes home in a box—for democracy in Iraq?" Column by Fred Reed.
"No, it was the infantilism, the snickering, low-IQ tastelessness of a class of people who have no class. These, with their childish prurience and slum-dweller’s aversion to civilized existence, now dominate American culture." Column by Fred Reed.
" They can’t read because our schools are in the hands of low-IQ social engineeresses with the academic inclinations of cocker spaniels." Column by Fred Reed.
"Don’t misunderstand me, lest I be thought unpatriotic or subject to a balmy idealism. I believe that people should kill each other, in the greatest numbers possible, with abundance and overflow." Column by Fred Reed.
"Sez me, we’d be better off if we had newspapers peopled exclusively by everything from loon commies singing the Internationale to bomb-everybody conservatives to race-based papers edited by Al Sharpton and David Duke. They could all fight with each other and keep each other straight. Fact is, with a diverse staff you don’t get diverse published opinion. Homogeneous staffs would give you diverse newspapers. Then maybe readers wouldn’t jump to the internet, the only diverse press we have." Column by Fred Reed.
"The dedicated soldier thinks in terms of honor, valor, loyalty, sacrifice, and heroism, of righting wrong and defeating evil, of proving himself in combat, of glory and exaltation and defending the fatherland. The reporter sees the dead lying in the street, the flies crawling in shattered craniums, the bombed-out cities for year after year without change. He hears this described as progress. To him it is pure bullshit." Column by Fred Reed.
"We need to recognize the seriousness of PMS. People joke about it, as they do about drunkenness, but these women are public hazards..... I think the police should send squads into supermarket parking lots to check for these impaired women. Other cops should wait outside churches. To better protect the public we should have checkpoints on highways." Column by Fred Reed.
" The schools are feminized, ideologized, psychologized, amphetamized, egalitized and therapeuted—and run by the government. They do everything they can to keep anyone else from opening a school that might work. We’re not illiterate despite the government, but because of it." Column by Fred Reed.
"Wars seem important at the time, but they usually aren’t. Five years later, they are history. About sixty thousand GIs died in Vietnam. We lost. Nothing happened. It was a stupid war for nothing. Today the guys who lost faces and legs and internal organs back then are just freaks. Nobody gives a damn about them, and nobody will give a damn about you. A war is a politician’s toy, but your wheelchair is forever. If you want adventure, try the fishing fleet in Alaska." Column by Fred Reed.
" My suspicion is that if bin Laden manages another major attack, or anyone else does, we will see something very close to martial law. It will be welcomed by all but a noisy few because it will be to make them secure and to take care of them, and give a wonderful sense of living through parlous times...." Column by Fred Reed.
Who Is Running This Choo-Choo Train?
" It might be more accurate to say that wars are the hobbies of half-informed children who have somehow come into possession of the levers of power. Can anyone possible believe that Mr. Bush knew anything about the Arab world when he set out to conquer it?" Column by Fred Reed.
" To me it is entertaining; to the rising Asian nations it is an inexplicable gift: The US, their competition, has put its children into the hands of simian gurglers mewling about diversity, which, while positively weird as seen through slanted eyes, it bodes well for Asia." Column by Fred Reed.
"I wish to propose a salubrious anarchy, a deliberate renunciation of fealty to country, society, and government, an assertion of independence from folly and moral decay. Permit me to offer a taxing political idea: When a society ceases to be worthy of support, it is reasonable to withdraw support. The time, I submit, has come." Column by Fred Reed.
"A man like that has some depth to him. He knows what life is. He has seen it." Column by Fred Reed.
"America has precious little poverty, if by poverty you mean lack of something to eat, clothing adequate to keep you warm and cover your private parts, and a dry and comfortable place to sleep." Column by Fred Reed.
"...we have much too much democracy. We need to discourage people from voting. In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society." Column by Fred Reed.
"Not a bad idea, maybe." Column by Fred Reed.
"The people lack the intelligence to govern any entity larger than a very small town. Particularly in the United States they read little, think less, know almost nothing of history, geography, the nature and politics of the world beyond the borders. They are thus easily swayed, frightened, enraged, gulled, and led into dog-pack patriotism by those, far smarter and more aware, who understand the levers of power. They so quickly give up liberty to those who offer to protect them. They are eager to do it. Look around you." Column by Fred Reed.
Perfecting Wastrelsy in Messico
Column by Fred Reed.
"You can see why he ate his gun. Everything he hated has returned. Nixon is back in the White House, Rumsnamara risen from the dead, bombs falling on other peoples’ suburbs. The Pentagon is lying again and democracy stalks yet another helpless country. This time the young are already dead and there will be no joyous anarchy. The press, housebroken, pees where it is told. But he gave it a hell of a try." Column by Fred Reed.
In Search of Men Who Want to Marry Mommy
"Actually, what men very much do not want is to marry Mommy. The problem for Maureen is that she is Mommy: censorious, moralizing, self-pitying, endlessly instructive, and so achingly tedious that men find themselves thinking of moldy bath sponges." Column by Fred Reed.
Objective Journalism and Hen's Teeth
"You have to be very ideologically committed indeed not to be worn down by the destruction and ghastliness of it all, by the mutilated kids and head-shot snipers’ victims, by flies crawling in the mouths of the dead. This is especially true of doubtful wars of uncertain provenance and murky purpose." Column by Fred Reed.
The Last Necessary Column on Politics
"Thus his love of government in all its meddlesome intrusiveness, pedestrian witlessness, and unrestrained drive for dominion. He—or rather more often, she—knows that without coercion, some people will not do as they ought: that they will besot themselves, behave wrongheadedly, teach their children heaven knows what, and march off in all different directions. They must be restrained. And since the restrained usually find ways of evading the constricting tentacles, ever more and more-detailed laws must be enacted to thwart each new escape. Thus the government will eventually come to dictate the altitude, material, color, shape, texture, and compressive strength of toilet seats." Column by Fred Reed.
"Our media are relentlessly, grindingly, hermetically controlled or, as we say, politically correct....Newspaper do not so much report the news as avoid it. The taboos are endless and rigid. What reporters know, they do not write; what they write, they do not believe. We all understand exactly what the media can say, can’t say, and will say. Sheer dishonesty rubs shoulders with poor content." Column by Fred Reed.
Recommended "For the paralyzed there will never be girlfriends, dancing, rolling in the grass with children. The blind will adapt as best they can. Those with merely a missing leg will count themselves lucky. They will hobble about, managing to lead semi-normal lives, and people will say, 'How well he handles it.' An admirable freak. For others it will be less good. A colostomy bag is a sorry companion on a wedding night." Column by Fred Reed.
"I tell you, coming back yearly to the United States is stranger than dwarf-tossing, maybe up there with licking toads. It’s like watching something dead that you once cared for decompose in time-lapse photography. The country is in lockdown." Column by Fred Reed.
"Which brings us to the Feddle Gummint. Between the coasts it’s seen as the enforcement arm of the coastal snots—a gray, repressive, stupid, intrusive, and alien force, as degrading as having your leg humped by the dog in somebody else’s living room. To a lot of people, Washington isn’t the capital of their country. It’s The Enemy. It pushes on them everything they loathe. They hate it." Column by Fred Reed.
"What have we done? And what now? Once the chain is broken, once no one any longer remembers how to write a sentence, much less the uses of the subjunctive, once Coleridge is forgotten and Milton and indeed everything beyond the mall, how can we recover what has been lost? I don’t think we can." Column by Fred Reed.
"Those who favor [the war] often point to the beheadings, for example, as evidence that 'they' are barbarians and deserve no mercy. It does not occur to them that bombing residential neighborhoods, because a guerrilla might be there, seems to those in the neighborhood to indicate that the Americans are barbarians and deserve no mercy." Column by Fred Reed.
"Familiarity—not fear of invisible radioactive death-needles from Mossad, or of being run out of journalism—is why I don’t devote my life to obsessing about the maleficence of Jews." Column by Fred Reed.
"The lobotomy box gives to Hollywood and New York limitless sculpting access to the minds of our children, limitless power to condition all of us. For hours a day, week after month after year after decade, each generation sees what the two cities wants it to see. It sees nothing else. Because the programming does not come from the formal government, because it seems to counsel only the purchase of New! Improved! Whatever! because we hold it in contempt while spending our lives before it, we—many of us—do not see what it really is." Column by Fred Reed.
"It is not easy to explain to an American readership under forty what is meant by being a woman. We are accustomed to androgynous, litigious, Prozac-sucking shrews who would inspire erectile dysfunction in an iron bar." Column by Fred Reed.
"The American attitude implied in policy, and expressed in the bow-wow-woofish patriotism of much of my email, is that most other countries are backward if not actually aboriginal, and in need of enlightenment, perhaps armed enlightenment. Contempt is reflexive and profound. Considerable of my email tells me that Iraqis for example are dirty and flea-bitten, understand nothing but force, and deserve any treatment they get....The eerie parochialism leads to disaster as the country blunders into swamps it does not understand and discovers that it has underestimated the enemy." Column by Fred Reed.
Curmudgeonly Reflections on Democracy
MUST READ "Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one's own suckering." Fred Reed nails it!
It's Not a Job, It's an Adventure
"War brutalizes people. It provides opportunities to people who are already brutal." Column by Fred Reed.
"There are huge numbers of people who don’t read books, have never read a book, who can’t read. According to Newsweek, forty-seven percent of Detroit is functionally illiterate. The illiterate live in a mental world beyond the capacity of a biochemist to imagine." Column by Fred Reed.
Recommended "...CNN says Mr. Bush is attacking Falafel...with an AC-130 Spectre gunship. Spectre makes a pretty good sword. In another life as a military columnist I flew in those things....If memory serves, they now have a 105 howitzer, 40mm Bofors, and 25mm Gatling stuck out one side. Spray a city with those, and they’ll love freedom, I say. And us, too. I always love people that blow up my neighborhood. Don’t you?" Column by Fred Reed. [Editor's note: Fred mentions General Kimmitt, who was the assistant commander of my division artillery when I was in the Army. He was a jerk. - Rob]
"The implications of female influence for freedom, at least as men understand the word, are not good. Women will accept restrictions on their behavior if in doing so they feel more secure. They have less need of freedom, which is not particularly important in living a secure, orderly, routine, and comfortable life." Column by Fred Reed.
"The rapid increase in surveillance of everybody and everything is taking, or so it seems to me, a new and unwholesome turn. We move toward a world in which many laws can be enforced strictly and unfailingly, everywhere and at all times." Column by Fred Reed.
"It is possible to become so inured to being told what to do, and how to do it, and who to do it with—to become so accustomed to being told what we can say, what we may publicly believe, what we must seem to think, how we must manage our affairs—that we cease to notice just how regimented we are. We are there. We now accept that very nearly everything whatsoever is the proper domain of government. Why?" Column by Fred Reed.
A Brief Textbook of American Democracy
" The media have two governmental purposes. The first is to prevent discussion and, to the extent possible, knowledge of taboo subjects. The second is to inculcate by endless indirection the values and beliefs of the permanent political class." Column by Fred Reed.
"The United States realizes that a citizen must be protected whether he wants to be or not—controlled, regulated, and intimidated in every aspect of everything he does, for his own good. He must not be permitted to ride a bicycle without a helmet, smoke if he chooses, or go to a bar where smoking is permitted. He cannot be trusted to run his life." Column by Fred Reed.
"The communists, exercising the mindless brutality common among them, had then killed huge if uncertain numbers of people for no reason and wrecked the country. This showed that the Russians and Americans could cooperate when they wished. Call it non-peaceful co-extermination. Or call it synergy or convergence or conservation of parity." Column by Fred Reed.
"We like to think of ourselves as more advanced than, say, the ancient Persians, and technologically we are. But recently, as in all the intervening years, we have done exactly the same things they did, only our chariots have turbines and high-velocity smooth-bores. We act the way we always act, because it's the only way we can act." Column by Fred Reed.
But Suresh Venktasubramanian can. Column by Fred Reed.
Marriage, Horror and Susan Reimer
"Were I to offer thoughts on marriage to young American men today, in these the declining years of a once-great civilization, my advice would be as follows: Don't do it. Or, if you do, do it in another country. In America marriage is a grievous error." Column by Fred Reed.
"...how much do people really care about freedom? On average, not much. Give them three hundred channels on the cable, alcohol, food, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and they will be docile if not always precisely happy....Increasingly the country consists of a bored suburban peasantry, politically inert, apathetic, in intellectual decline, oscillating from cubicle to sofa. As long as the government doesn't crash through their doors, which it almost never will unless opposed, the cameras won't bother them." Column by Fred Reed.
Ethnic Purgation, Academic Disaster
"Since Whiteness Studies is explicitly aimed at segregating the races, how about this: 'Your racial or ethnic group invented (take one step for each): Computational fluid dynamics. Tensor calculus. The harpsichord. The theory of finite automata. Cardiac surgery. Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism. Writing. The wheel.'" Column by Fred Reed.
"Mother Pupatello has found a new twist in the social rope: Coercive third-party civil rights. She wants to impose unwanted rights, and then enforce them. Dwarf-tossing, which is voluntary behavior between consenting adults, becomes a violation of rights, though no one involved thinks it is, and nobody asked Mommy Sandra in the first place. (Who, by the way, is in violation? The dwarf willingly engages in the tossing. He's violating his own civil rights. We should jail dwarves.)" Column by Fred Reed.
Recommended "In my daily snowstorm of email I find furious appeals to patriotism, usually addressed to large lists of recipients. The writers invoke The Founding Fathers, urge fealty, and counsel solidarity with all the whoop and holler of a camp meeting. I'm puzzled. Why is patriotism thought to be a virtue? It seems to me a scourge." An outstanding column by Fred Reed.
"Almost universal among them is a profound desire not to be part of somebody else's parade. They want to be left alone. In the semi-developed countries favored by expats, governments usually don't care about you unless you break the law. Sometimes they don't care even if you do break the law, depending on the law. The big North American governments never stop supervising, admonishing, collecting data, requiring forms. Those who dislike it enough end up somewhere else." Column by Fred Reed.
"Of course another approach to admissions is possible. One might, if one could not be fired, ask why the government should meddle at all. Right now, universities are mad to collect black students. Why not let them? If a few universities chose to admit only highly qualified whites, or only qualified students, why not also let them? The government being incapable of impartiality, why not try something else? (We could call it, say, "freedom.")" Column by Fred Reed.
"I can understand, barely, reading about the cellulite of some talentless twit who may have been cute twenty years go, but probably wasn’t. Given a choice, I’d rather pound my thumb with a claw-hammer, but I’m a curmudgeon." Column by Fred Reed.
Confessional (In Which Fred Reveals a Horrible Truth About Himself)
"Patriots make much of the dismal record of the French in matters military. Well, yes. It's hard to argue with failure. I note however that the French have Germany on their borders, a condition associated with military failure for everybody enjoying the same circumstances. Americans cannot always distinguish between military prowess and the Atlantic Ocean. In fact a great many Americans cannot find the Atlantic Ocean." Column by Fred Reed.
"The advantages of allowing unrestricted copying would be large. The intellectual heritage of mankind would be at the disposal of anyone with a computer. The internet would become a vast public library. Any book, any music, or any movie would be instantly available to anyone anywhere. The world's cultural wealth would become a public utility, like tap water." Column by Fred Reed.
Doing What We Can't Help Doing
"When you notice that all teenagers do the same things at the same time, you suspect that what is involved is hormones. So with wars....We fight for the same reasons fish school and peacocks strut--because it's how we are." An excellent column by Fred Reed.
"The trick, maybe, is choosing the right one." A column by Fred Reed that I think Thoreau would have appreciated and agreed with.
"Perspectives change. Later, for veterans who no longer had legs or eyes, who had lost their guts or become paras and quads, the splendor dimmed.... Those who survived soon realized that in six months no one would care what they had gone through, yet they would spend the rest of their lives in the wheel chair. A colostomy bag, they found, was not a great conversation piece in a singles bar. For them, the war never went away." Column by Fred Reed.
"Now, understand: I'm patriotic, and believe in blowing up as many people as possible, wherever we can find them. But...why Iraq? It's mysterious. Sure, Hussein is a good, serviceable, every-day sort of monster and ought to be shot. So are about half the rulers in the world. Why this one? Bobby Mugabe needs it more, I reckon. Have we thought about Zaire?" Column by Fred Reed.
"This isn't discipline. It's sadism-sexless, boring, mean-spirited bureaucratic sadism. The school's officials are seeking to hurt the child because they enjoy doing it. This Stalinism of the inadequate isn't a fluke....The schools are in the hands of sodden prisses, intellectual offal, who don't like male children. Mediocrity loves revenge, revenge on others for one's own mediocrity." Column by new Root Striker Fred Reed.