The Myth of Equality -- When the Liberal New York Times Let the Cat out of the Bag
By
David Gottfried
I have been haunted by an article written by Nicholas Kristof which appeared in the New York Times on July 18, 1995. In commenting on the Japanese ardor for educational achievement, he spoke about “Education Mommas.” These are women who will do anything to ensure that their sons obtain academic laurels. They fear that the sexual desires of their adolescent sons might interfere with their schoolwork. After all, time spent looking for girls is time detracted from memorizing arcane and useless facts. Therefore, the Mothers make themselves sexually available to their sons. Kristof stated:
“The pressure from parents is even greater, particularly from the "education mama." These are devoted housewives whose mission in life is to wheedle and bully their children to spend every moment studying.
Some "education mamas" have been quoted in the Japanese press as saying they had sex with their own sons, so that the boys would not need to waste time dating girls. Soap operas and a movie have been made about such mother-son relationships.”
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, July 18, 1995.
Nicholas Kristoff is of course a highly esteemed writer from the Times, he is considered as true blue as the “Grey Lady,” and he is as polished and erudite as any preening liberal sipping champers with Hillary and Bill.
I don’t want to come off like a racist, but the more I am told that we are all the same and that we are all equal, the more I chafe at the dogma of equality.
Maybe I will be clearer if I reduced things to mathematics. (Indeed, in the 19th century, there were a breed of philosophers known as physicalists who believed that we should strive for clarity and that the more used concrete, physical things and math, the more lucid one would be.)
The number 50 is not equal to the number 150 and an IQ of 50 is not equal to an IQ of 150. All human beings are deserving of respect and they should all be permitted to soar as high as their abilities may take them, but not all people are equal.
So I wonder: Do Japanese people, who wink at incest, really have the same moral compass as Westerners.
According to Freud – I can already hear the chorus of angry feminists screaming that one can’t discuss Freud because he was a sexist (Except that leading feminist Maureen Dowd is allowed to talk about the Oedipus complex all the time because she believes it explains the latter Bush’s hawkishness on Iraq) -- the Oedipus complex, in which the son learns that he must yield to his Father in their competition for his Mother, teaches us forbearance and guilt. Apparently, the Japanese resolution of the Oedipus complex is very different from our own, and we must wonder if their variant approach to the Mother-Father-Son trinity results in a compromised sense of morality.
I wonder about this when I consider reports that so many products in Asia are made without quality controls, that the Chinese have been selling beef that has been frozen for twenty or thirty years, that in China dissidents are arrested, put in slave labor camps and after they are killed their organs are sold to Wealthy Europeans who need an organ transplant, and that the Japanese, in World War Two, pulled eyes out of the eye sockets of those who came under their jurisdiction and squashed the eyes against the wall.
Then again, the West gave us the gas chambers of Auschwitz and anti-personnel weapons – they were used by Americans in Vietnam and soon became a big favorite of Islamic terrorists – so perhaps we are all equally rotten.
However, even if we are all truly rotten, we are all rotten in our own ways. Western rottenness is not the same as Asian rottenness which is not the same as African rottenness. (In Rwanda, in the ethno-genocide of the 1990’s, the Hutus were not content to merely kill Tutsi’s; they disemboweled them, i.e., they ripped their guts out of their bodies and then used their intestines as necklaces.)
Accordingly, we should look askance at those sunshiny liberals, those precious, delicate children with heads so empty they are ready to float into the sky like helium balloons, who believe that integration is easy to achieve, that we are all ready to love one another and that there are no real differences among people. As Paul Newman said in one of my favorite movies, “The Exodus,” “People are different, and they want to be different.”