I thought this piece in Barron's was really good.
Is this the same guy who does that quiz-show spoof on Comedy Channel?
Wake Up, America!
It's time to end the childish -- and dangerous
-- daydreaming that's already proved costly
By Ben Stein
There is a psychiatric disorder called "magical thinking" that
includes the belief that by following certain superstitions, or just by
wishing, logically impossible effects will follow. Magical thinking
often involves also a general dreamlike, childlike belief in
omnipotence. Think of Rocky or any James Bond film or any other
feature-length cartoon, in which love conquers all, a superpowerful
hero saves the good people from all harm, and evil is always
humbled by good, no matter what the odds.
Or you might think of the sleepwalking, dreamy, head-in-the-sand
way America has approached the world for most of the past 20
years. As a nation, we have been behaving like dreamy small
children -- or very disordered adults.
Examples: Burying our heads in the sand about the oft-expressed
and now carried-out violent wishes of Arab terrorists to harm
America. Walking away from the prosecution of those who killed our
servicemen in the Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia.
Letting Libya, which blew up Pan Am 103, suffer only a bombing run
on Qadafhi's tent and letting it make the almost comical excuse that
in a totalitarian state, two intelligence officers acted alone. Letting
the terrorists who blew up our Marines in Lebanon get off scot-free.
Letting the people who blew up the destroyer Cole and killed
American sailors get away with it. Letting the terrorists openly run
training academies all over the Mideast for years, if not generations.
Letting graduates of those academies, allied with those who blew
up the Cole and the embassies, come to America to strike with
even more deadly force.
Other examples far closer to the daily lives of ordinary Americans:
Believing that the importance of money has been suspended.
Imagining that companies without any earnings or prospects for
earnings can have valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Admiring companies with interesting names but no possibility of
returning any earnings to their shareholders. Thinking that all human
and investment history has been superseded by one invention and
that all modes of investment valuation hitherto are obsolete.
The magic box promotes magical thinking: Believing that men and
women with zero training in finance who happen to be in front of a
camera know more than persons who do have training and
experience. Placing faith in such things as "support levels" attached
to irrelevant index numbers never seen by the persons buying or
selling individual stocks making up the indexes.
There is no comparison or connection between the incredible evil
that brought us the mass killings of last week and the phenomenon
of the stock bubble of the past several years. But there is a very
direct connection between the extraordinary magical thinking and
the carelessness that led us as a nation to fall victim to both. We
simply stopped thinking logically or sensibly.
The same incompetent and childish thinking that makes us scream
for Madonna or present Gary Condit's infidelity as the story of the
century or imagine we can change our lives by gaining or losing a
few pounds has led us to believe that real life is a movie, and that
magical endings will come along to save us all from the monsters
we imagine in our sleep.
Osama bin Laden and his pals in Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Afghanistan and Hollywood, Florida, have sent us a
murderous wake-up call. Sleepy-time is over now. Real life is back
in session, we are in deep trouble, and magical thinking is not going
to help us.
We are in a position a lot like where we were in late 1941 and early
1942. The enemy attacked us with a sneak attack that succeeded
beyond our wildest nightmare (although not beyond the enemy's wild
dreams). We are reeling. But it could be far worse. In 1941 and
1942, before we and our allies had turned around, we faced the task
of fighting over millions of square miles in Oceania, Asia, Europe
and North Africa, and breaking the dominion of evil over hundreds of
millions of lives. We faced an enemy incomparably more potent than
Islamic terrorists. We faced Germany and Japan, two hundred
million capable, disciplined, well-armed people with a strong desire
to win and a willingness to die trying. (The kamikazes were the
single worst wartime enemy American sailors ever faced, and an
eerie precursor of the hijackers last week.) The enemy had a
seemingly unstoppable military machine. The Japanese had never
lost a war, and Hitler seemed invincible, even to some Americans.
Had America not awakened after Pearl Harbor, names like India,
Britain and Australia would have joined the names of captive places
like France, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hong Kong,
Singapore, New Guinea, Saipan, Indochina and Burma. And maybe
America would have been on the list as well.
But we did wake up, and remade America into a model of vigilance,
heroism, productivity and daring. We didn't worry a lot about hurting
anyone's feelings. We didn't think all day about not hurting one
single innocent person. We bombed their cities from the air. We
went from a tiny military to 12 million under arms in a couple of
years. We spent half the national product on defense and we
restricted some freedoms, maybe too many, but we won and saved
the whole future of mankind.
Now we must do that again. And the stakes are immense. No one
doubts that an enemy who will ram a plane whose passengers
include sixth graders on a field trip into a populated office building
would use an atom bomb if they had it, or diseases like anthrax or
poison gasses like sarin.
What should be our response? We should not wait to respond.
Bomb the places in Iraq and Iran and anywhere else where they
make these hideous weapons right now, today, before terrorist cells
or nations use them against us. We have enemies out there who
want to end this nation's existence. It's brutally serious but also
brutally plain. Strike hard and strike fast at the killers. We can sing
"Kumbayah" and "Give Peace a Chance" later.
We have to awaken within our borders, too. It is appalling, perhaps
even criminal, that the hijacker killers were on FBI watch lists, on
lists of international terrorists and still lived in plain view using their
real names. The persons responsible for these mammoth lapses at
the FBI or the Immigration and Naturalization Service or wherever
should be fired, maybe even prosecuted for breach of duty. How will
anyone in this country ever know enough to be vigilant if someone
can screw up and let 5,000 people get killed -- and still keep his
job?
The home front is the front line. We have to look for the enemy. We
have to report it if we see someone who talks about how much he
hates America taking pilot lessons. It's worth 10,000 false alarms to
stop one plane or one dose of germ warfare in New York's water
supply. If some people's feelings are hurt, that's a very small price to
pay to save a nation.
We also have to do something similar in our own lives. We have
been living in a dream world about our investments. Just as it's our
duty to guard our country, it's our duty to guard our family's financial
future. No more wishful thinking. Back to reality, away from belief in
the supernatural in stocks, Old Economy or New Economy.
Reversion to the mean is a law, not a choice. If you get there sooner
rather than later, you'll be safer.
A shrewd stock buy or a prudent sale is never comparable to
defense against mass murder in any sense. But there is much in
common in the carelessness, dreamy foolishness and magical
thinking that allowed both stock-market bubbles and immense gaps
in our national defense.
If we can put this childishness behind us, if we can put aside childish
things, if we can grow up as fast as America did in the beginning of
World War II, our future is assured. We fight for the same cause --
human liberty and decency versus merciless repression. We have to
approach this conflict with the same spirit that animated America
after Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Corregidor.
Winston Churchill, who should be our inspiration, said after the U.S.
entered the war, "This is no time to speak of the hopes of the future
... We have to win that war for our children. We have to win it by our
sacrifices. We have not won it yet. The crisis is upon us."
And so it is again.
BEN STEIN, a former speechwriter fo President Richard Nixon, is a TV personality,
lawyer and writer based in Los Angeles. |
