How Myopic Ron DeSantis Induces Moral Mediocrity
Ironically enough, Conventional Sexual Morality, including marriage and children, sometimes instills moral lassitude or patent immorality
By
David Gottfried
Ron DeSantis, and other candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, are mouthing off with the usual platitudinous manure about what is morally upright. Among other things, they posit that the conventional heterosexual family, with children, is conducive to the creation of a sunlit, immaculate state, free of sin, and that married people are paragons of propriety, something along the lines of Ward Cleaver and June Cleaver of “Leave it To Beaver.”
In prior essays, I may have already explained why marriage and procreation might actually inhibit altruistic and morally commendable behavior. With this essay, I will briefly recapitulate the factors which often consign married people to moral mediocrity, and I will supplement my prior arguments with ideas, furnished by David Halberstam (A journalist made famous by his exquisite, seminal reporting on Vietnam), explaining how married people mucked-up American foreign policy.
You may think that psychosexual mores have nothing to do with foreign policy, but keep reading and you will realize that marital commitments facilitated the debacle that was Vietnam.
How Marriage and Children constrain and sometimes impede morally commendable behavior
When one is married, and one has children, the North Star of one’s life becomes the maximization of one’s child’s academic, athletic and financial advancement. Parents want their children to succeed where they have failed, and in this hypercapitalistic society, where lavish rewards are never enough and one must always surpass one’s fellows, most people believe they have failed in myriad ways and so they demand that their children accomplish myriad miracles. They want their kids to ace the SATS, rival the “creme de la crème” among sports stars, and become filthy rich prodigies in some new-fangled techno-financial venture such as Bit coins or Facebook.
Because child-rearing is such an all-consuming chore, one has no time for anything else. A married person, with a child, pays almost no attention to anything outside of his claustrophobic, tightly circumscribed world. He is deaf, dumb and blind to starvation in Darfur, the persecution of the Kurds, the travails of Christian Copts in Egypt. He has no time to march for peace, contribute spare change to put food in a child’s belly, or write a letter to his congressman. He doesn’t even have time to read a brief article in a newspaper. When he listens to the evening news, he only pays attention when the prying eyes of the press casts its invasive gaze on the private lives of a celebrity. His stance was perfectly described by Karl Marx: He is the petty bourgeois philistine. He lives in a western nation that purports to be a democratic nation, and is actually in many respects democratic, but it is a nation in which democracy is rarely practiced and, in fact, atrophies and dies. Why? Because the freedom to make money eviscerates all other freedoms; one spends all of one’s time hunting dollars and forgets all other freedoms. The petty bourgeois philistine cares not a whit for trivial things such as the human condition. He is married to his portfolio.
Sometimes the febrile and furious quest to make one’s kiddies as well-known as Albert Schweitzer or Adolf Hitler (the obsession with stardom is so severe that some people don’t care if they are famous for their good works or their foul play; they just want their 15 minutes of fame) makes one not only morally indifferent but sometimes downright sadistic.
While parents fight a jihad on behalf of their children, they necessarily fight a jihad against everybody else, and in particular everybody else’s children. Since rewards are rationed, and since professors grade “on the curve,” another child’s loss is your child’s ticket to success. This desire to undermine other peoples’ children grows and festers until one develops a generalized distaste for one’s fellow man that often blossoms into frank and fulminating misanthropy (This was on full view the last time I was in a movie theatre, which was when I saw “Schindler’s List” and suffered the presence of hordes of moral degenerates who happily chomped down on ice cream and hot dogs while watching people getting tortured and murdered on the movie screen.)
The immediately preceding might seem a bit paranoid or hyperbolic, but people more esteemed than I have written extensively on related subjects: Thorstein Veblen, in his scathing critique of “conspicuous consumption,” portrayed capitalistic people as pure, unadulterated witchy bitches from hell. He actually proved that capitalism suppressed production because sometimes a capitalist will sabotage or undermine the work of his competitors, reducing the output of a competitor’s factory. And then again, nobody can top Marx for revealing the opportunistic sadism at the heart of the capitalistic endeavor:
Marx called his science “dialectical materialism.” He turned Hegel’s theory of dialectical idealism on its head. Hegel said: Every idea has within itself the seeds of its antithesis. Marx said: Every material circumstance has the seeds of its antithetical circumstance, meaning that being rich necessarily created poverty and want. Very simply, the rich got rich by robbing other people blind.
In any event, since the drive to go for broke for one’s kids entails taking from others to advance one’s children, advancing one’s kids is often an aggressive and hostile act against other peoples’ children.
A Few Crucial Qualifications:
I am not saying that people should stop procreating. I want humanity to keep going. (Why, I am not sure) I am saying that married people with children are not enough. Very simply, when one is married and has kids, one spends one’s life huddling around the hearth giving the kids a sense of security, which is often achieved by following norms and rules. Very simply procreators have no time to do anything big. They will not dethrone a tyrant; they will not start a revolution – they won’t utter the slightest whimper of discontent. They are the people who prompted Austrian Archduke Metternich to contemptuously dismiss common people, saying, “the masses are Inert.”
Since one or even one million single adults do not constitute a sufficiently sizable bunch to effect major change, we need a society in which a substantial minority of people are not shackled by any domestic duties.
How David Halberstam Showed that Marital Commitments, and a Wife’s Fervent Need to Show off her Gown at a Lavish Embassy Party, Undermined American Foreign Policy
Whether one supported the Vietnam War or Opposed the Vietnam War, one should agree that the American People, and America’s leaders, would have benefited from honest news reports.
However, until the mid to late sixties, most news reports, regarding Vietnam, were fictitious. David Halberstam explained that married reporters were more apt to refrain from telling the truth about Vietnam.
Men like General Harkins (The head of MACV, military assistance command Vietnam) and ambassador Nolting routinely disseminated information which was patently false. They told the press that the South Vietnamese were valiant anti communists when in fact most of the peasants hated our guts and were sympathetic to the communists. Also, the military inflated “kill counts” (reports of the number of enemy soldiers killed) by adding the number of civilians killed.
Halberstam said that married journalists were too beholden to their wives to have the balls to talk about Vietnam as it was.
Halberstam explained that General Harkins and Ambassador Nolting gave great parties on the weekends.
The parties deposited a little bit of Georgetown, spiked with the prodigious wealth of the Tzarist Court, into napalm and agent orange infested Vietnam.
Any self-respecting rich bitch of the pre-feminist era knew she just had to be invited to every grand party hosted by General Harkins and Ambassador Nolting. She had to go to the party so she could sashay around the ballroom in a sequined gown that made her imagine that she was the white version of Diana Ross, veritably ready to start singing “Baby Love” at the drop of a hat.
However, if her Hubbie journalist strayed from the role of being a mere mouthpiece for Harkins and Nolting, and told the truth about Vietnam, she and her Hubbie would not get an invitation.
This is fucking amazing: Some people lied about the war in Vietnam because their wives wanted to go to glittering parties in sardonic, blood-stained Saigon.
Of course, sometimes punishment for telling the truth was much more severe. President Kennedy was so dismayed by David Halberstam’s critical reporting of our Vietnam policy that Kennedy asked the New York Times to send Halberstam to some other country. (Congrats to the NY Times for saying no to Prez Kennedy) Because Halberstam was single at the time, he was not frightened by threats to his career, and he was bold enough to report with candor.1
Incidentally, John Kennedy became increasingly alienated from Pentagon policy and Bobby Kennedy became a fierce foe of the war. For more on Robert Kennedy and Halberstam, read Halberstam’s “The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy,” the best biography of Bobby Kennedy – and a biography which, to its credit, spends only one fleeting, miserable moment, at the end of the book, on Bobby’s assassination.