Now and again, I've made referral to the Squeamish; one of the most unpleasant constituencies, up in Washington, as a body can encounter. Almost as intransigent as the China lobby, though not half so generous. As I will explain, in good time, there are Virtuecrats, who tend to fly off the right wing, the neo-lib politically correct off the left... Squeamishness, well, call it the center of the bat as both wings sprout from.

The Squeamish (as distinct from Amish, who live simply and produce useful commodities) are mostly white and well-off, but live mental lives of great complexity in looking for stuff to take offense at... usually "on behalf of" other creatures who, mostly, wish the Squeamish would just go away. If they had to struggle for their livings, they'd lack time and inclination to go messing round other people's business, hunting down anything as might hurt somebody's feelings. So them in cities whose downtowns are empty... owing to all the bums and criminals 'round... help the corrupt (and mostly Democrat administrations) to guilt-trip gumment into keeping the money flowing down toilets because to admit such places were toilets would hurt the feelings of the bums and muggers.

These Squeamish! Impervious to pleasure, or the pain of being recognized as the bulldada-spouting idiots they are, must've inspired that old Eagles' ditty "Desperado". With them, vacant of highs and lows as they are, feelings matter, appearance matters, content basically counts for nothing.

I guess that you could make the case for Squeamishness being a product of the Sixties, though it draws inspiration from the Fifties... the Hollywood fifties where black and white sitcoms like Ozzie, Father Knows Best, the Beaver posited a rote community of white picket fences and colored maids rolling big, googly eyes. Invisible fathers with invisible jobs, hats and "hello, honey, I'm home!" Buried deep within the heart, or brain, or spleen of every Squeamish is nostalgia for such past as never existed, except on television. Anglo-Indian journalist Shiva Naipaul compared Americans of the squeamish classes to the race of Eloi in the H. G. Wells book and movie "Time Machine"... as "play and fashion garlands while the ravenous Morlocks plan supper below." Wilhelm Reich, somewhat more callously, contends the Squeamish know exactly the consequences of their stance... "As bitter as it may be, the fact remains: it is the irresponsibleness of masses of people that lies at the basis of fascism of all countries, nations and races."

Like Armageddonists (and Ralph Nader), their Paradise is a hell-on-earth born of deliberate inaction... or anti-actions... taken to provoke a worst case scenario. But, being unchurched liberals, for the most part, their objective isn't forcing the hand of God, or setting up a proletarian dictatorship... it's feeling good about themselves. Self-esteem!

After wars on poverty, Vietnam and such were lost, political correction (as we'll take on, next installation) retreated either to government bureaucracies, to universities (whose faculty, conservative Jeffrey Hart reminds us, "are not, by and large, producers of anything,") or to the protest ghetto of day jobs waitressing and cab driving, leavened by the occasional direct action of spraypainting graffiti on a church or lining up in the streets on the anniversary of something or other to be hauled away, like trash, by the police. Or rooting, from the sidelines, for psychopaths as fester on the extreme margins of society, their excesses excused by gangsta wannabes like Will Raspberry as "crimes of passion and crimes of despair."

African boys used to have "to go out and kill a lion, or they had to do something that was considered dangerous," gang apologist Ahmed Obafemi of the New Afrikan People's Organization says, by way of explaining why rape, wilding and cop-killing are considered justifiable initiation rites. "We, Afrikan people, no longer have our rites of passage. So that period comes when you get to a certain age, when you're becoming a man, and you've got to express that."

Confronted with green-lighting of their own extinction as an inevitable resolution of New Leftism, white activists of the 60's barricaded their puny physiques behind increasingly cumbersome walls of post-Wittgensteinian process... as alleges computer scientist Daniel Dennett... behind which self-hatred may be indulged in without serious physical risk.

"I think that activism itself is a privilege," concluded one New Age talking head, in a perfect fin du siecle example of the PC snake eating its own (vegetarian, cruelty-free) tail. "Let's face it, to be able to go to all of these meetings you have to have either some kind of economic, educational, or other kind of privilege."

Understandably, all but the hardcore PC... as such masochistic morons who occasionally run into Nevada deserts where nuclear tests are scheduled... migrated rightwards towards the "politics" of right consumption and, eventually, NIMBYhood... "classic suburban moderates" David Broder succors them. But here, also, as Adam Smith first mentioned two centuries ago, "the fortunate and proud" begin to wonder "at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery, presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness."

So dive for the cellular and call a cop! One by one, outposts of hedonism colonized in the '60s were squished under the thin, sour high heels of left, right and dead center authority like unwanted kittens and puppies euthanized in humane societies "for their own good". AIDS happened, turning sex "cool and mean", reflected Michael V. Miller, spawning a sublimation industry of dirty words and bitter games. Virtuecrats elected Reagan, and began filling the jails. Secular Squeamish... like Mike Barone of the Washington Post... credited "nature" with dictating "that it's not always best in the long run to maximize pleasure or freedom in the short run." Threatening letters named Santa Claus as a poor role model, a moral miscreant who ate too much and laughed too much to be let loose round vulnerable children. (But, highlighting our fascination with delusions... or considering, perhaps, potential damage to the national economy... the good burghers of Coral Gables, Florida, caned... metaphorically... Fabiola Mehu-Pelissier, that substitute teacher as said that the Man in Red didn't exist.)

Didn't help that most of those as raised heck in the '60s, then went disco in the '70s had to face the ravages of time, against which the sex, drugs and rock n' roll now meant an occasional Viagra, Rogaine or bootleg Celebrex and easy listening, as used to be dismissed as "elevator music". The zero tolerance gets tolerable once a body's tolerance for excess flees, and thoughts of "...why should those damn kids be so happy?" take root! Reminds me of this joke Russians began telling after Gorby quit to sell pizza: There were three farmers on the Volga who eked out a miserable living on a collective farm, but one day an angel appeared... part of the heresy since, of course, there weren't supposed to be angels under the Communism. Anyway, this angel granted the usual three wishes... though, being Russian, that broke down to only one apiece. The first wished for a chicken so as to have eggs, the second... a little bolder... for a cow, so he could have his own milk. The angel gave them what they asked for, then approached the third. "I'm a Communist Party member," he said, "a true believer in the equality of all men, even under a God as doesn't exist. Kill my neighbors' animals!"

British researcher Liz Hodgkinson, finding that, over time, male ejaculations dissipate zinc (a trace mineral without which men become moody and restless) concluded: "I see falling in love as a disease." She also boasted of having converted her husband to celibacy, after first making him a vegetarian.

About the only vice left for the Squeamish to wallow in is reflected victimhood - which they've been doing for more than two decades, now. Since being a spokesperson for victims means there's money to be had, through the courts, out come sharp-eyed lawyers as advertise on the late night television and in back pages of strange little journals with articles on how welfare transfers power to black women, making black men have to commit crimes, how rat lovers in Atlanta passed this law banning possession of big snakes as is being appealed, on religious grounds, by Fundamentalist sects, or why the Pasco, Washington Jaycees had to scissor O. J. Simpson out of their Halloween pageant, but Jeff Dahmer was allowed to remain.

I guess they were just following the anti-Squeamish logic as I teach my own boys... "eat that which you kill!"

PC may be resolutely Left Feminazi, but Right Squeamish aren't above using legal tricks either, like getting women out of contracts by contending that, as left-brain creatures, they're incapable of understanding the implications of right-brain, patriarchal concepts like paying. Pee Ceisters undoubtedly populated the Redding, California school district, as paid that burglar who injured himself falling through a skylight $76,500 plus $1,200 a month for twenty years. Or the National Italian American Foundation, these Squeamish Italians of about a decade ago, as sued the producers of "Johnny Bago", a show about this guy driving round in a Winnebago... on the grounds that Bago rhymes with "dago"... which, in River City, probably stands for a pool of litigation!

Impotent between ghetto violence and State counter-violence, the Squeamish maintain dubious lineaments of masculinity (or what passes for it among feminists of either gender) by seizing upon public language as best reflective of their moral high ground. This works, so long as they choose enemies even more timid than themselves... education bureaucrats, Democrats and certain big, flabby corporate dinosaurs. Again (though Virtuecrats blame the 60's), most Squeamish doublespeak flowed downwards, at first, from salesmen and public relations speakers who, as Galbraith sneered, replaced the 19th century financial "crisis" or "panic" with the euphemism "depression", then "recession", finally "market correction", "growth adjustment" etc. "Cognitive elites" bombed countries "in order to save them", other moral monstrosities became explained as failure of the "shield of defaults".

Like the Japanese Sandman, the Squeamish sang: "Now, all you babies pay attention to me!"

By now, even those as reach for their guns at a whiff of PC will go Squeamish when it befits their purposes - a while back I went down to Montgomery looking for the Central Alabama Militia (folks I thought more Tillerman than Catfish, but what the heck!)... only to find they'd changed their name to the Alabama Constitutional Militia in an attempt to reflect a kinder, gentler image. "We're not giving up our weapons," Commander John Hassey assured me, but added "we believe the political arena is the only way anything can be won."

I hear Austin's even invited some up to the CNC convention... I sure hope we're not turning into one of those processing plants into which people march, as people, and crawl out Squeamish!

Anyhoo... the reason some put up with Squeamish whinings at their gate's that certain Squeamish doctrines as medicalization of evil translates into money in the pocket for bureaucracies like the Centers for Disease Control, as like to scrap with cops and Prison Industrial Complex over whether criminals are criminal, or merely sick. Lotta cash riding on whether, for example, alcoholism's a disease or behavior... plenty of pressure on the Supremes to overturn this 1988 ruling that drunks are entitled to free hospitalization on the Veterans Administration or Medicare tab, being that the poor fellows just can't help themselves. Felonious wolves from Micky Deaver and Bob Packwood, to the doofus who sticks up a QualMart, then tells the judge "it was beer (or drugs, or Twinkies) that did it!" look forward with hunger, too. Fancy hospitals are nicer places to spend a spell "in recovery" than prisons, especially the private sort.

(On the other hand, it's easier to feed just about any habit in American jails!)

Excusing private failings while, at the same time, excoriating public risk, leads to a certain paralysis, a reluctance to meet challenges I've heard called deer-in-the-headlights syndrome. Intelligent people of JFK's time were certain we'd have colonized the moon by now, gone to Mars... hell, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke started off "2001" with an expedition to Jupiter! Then along came Challenger, where an irresistible forces of smarmy PR sent this grade school teacher up into space, only to meet the immovable object of the Caribbean she and others smacked into after falling out of the sky... on television, yet! And, then, the Columbia because... near as I can tell... the bureacrats were disinclined to tell the crew about the damage and have them wait for Russians to rescue them. Sic transit, ad astra... something like that... Since a prime tenet of Squeamishness is that nobody's allowed to die, ever, even NASA's become a squeamish sump, a worthless boondoggle of occasionally sending Maytag astronauts up to repair Moldovian satellites before they fall out of the stars and bop Milwaukee.

They're regular Ling Ting Tongs, as'll tell you they'll never do wrong!

Evidence now: Sea World Orlando's simulated "Key West Village" down-to-the-manatees and fake palms replica with singing, Hemingway-spouting pizza servers and ceiling fans (but no cruising homosexuals, no bugs and no alcohol). "Pretty pathetic," says Jimmy Weekly, City Commissioner for the real Key West.

Disney, for its part, is also trying to lowjack Sea World by releasing another animated version of "The Old Man and the Sea" this July, except that, in the Disney version, all the fishes and fishermen, too, sing... and the big fish gets away. "It is our hope that nobody will be offended by the film," a Disney spokesperson declared last week.

In a better world, machinations and schemes of the Squeamish would be relegated to amusement parks with funny mirrors, popcorn, bumper cars and a fifty seven dollar cover (tax, gratuities and some rides not included). In Squeamish World, there would be booths where tofu baseballs would be tossed at spraycans of perfume and homophobic comedians to win cute, ceramic baby seals, dolphins and spotted owls. There could be anti-pedophile "No Touching" galleries, Japanese bioengineered "tearless" onion rins for sale, a "borderline personality disorder" roller coaster, and... every hour on the hour... a sexual harasser would be publicly Bobbitized under flags and banners as bear quotes from Rosseau, Robespierre and Allan Bloom to the effect that, as Natural Man is whole and Civil Man made fractional: "Progress culminates in the recognition that life is meaningless."

I rather suspect most Republicans and Virtuecrats would have a gay old time at Squeamish World, too, so long as the lesbian sections were clearly marked off with pink tape and gum got promptly scraped off of the pavement. Squeamishness dovetails quite politely with Virtuocracy, as when such as Jimmy Swaggart blame Secular Humanists as are "man-centered and believe in evolution and total reading freedom," and call for Big Gumment's Rod of Correction. Squeamish politicians in Fort Worth (a breed about as exotic as gay, black Republicans who've never went on "Politically Incorrect") fainted dead away when this cattle sculpture turned out long in more than the horns. "We had requested a steer," said Roland Mackie of Sundance Square Management. "We got a bull." They had to pay some welder to Bobbitt off the offending mountain oysters.

That vote to kick Babe Ruth out of the Hall of Fame for drinking failed last winter, but the postals did airbrush Freud's pipe off'n his stamp, like previously with Jack the Dripper's cigarette, and the attorney general in Alabam did, finally, get his anti-vibrator bill through the Statehouse. "There is no fundamental right to buy products in pursuit of sexual pleasure," remarked Tom Sugar on the bill's passage and, almost immediately, the state found itself on the... well... receiving end of a lawsuit by the World Futurists, as want to expand their chain of robot brothels out of Nevada and Jersey, Biloxi and New Orleans. Futurian Devon Arthur compares android-poking to intercourse with your toaster or vacuum cleaner - strange, but not against any laws as are presently written.

Matter's gone up before the same judge in Anniston as finally cleared the dildo prohibition. At least our judiciary's not yet so bad as those in Germany who, to speed up reunification and counter accusations of "victor's justice" in their ongoing prosecutions of former East German officials as were "just doing their job", threw out a dragnet and hauled in 72-year old Rudolf Muller who, in 1962, outdrew an Ossie border guard firing at him in a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. For this, Muller was punished with five years in some Colonel Klink's klink, but pardoned out after only one, nullifying the imperative for America, if under the CNC, to swoop down and bust him out.

If nothing else, the Squeamish are determined to prove that the twenty first will be no century for heroism!

Orwell warned us all about that... once the State finishes with our bodies, our minds, history and heritage are next course on the menu. (Thus Salem, Massachusestts bans witch-trial tours as don't promote "a positive image of the city", Germany cut down this forest where contrasting tree leaf colors reminded somebody of a swastika, and France outlaws dwarf tossing over the objections of "Mr. Skyman", whose protests of discrimination... normally assumed valid... were, instead, answered by the U.N. Human Rights Committee to the effects that dwarves "are the only individuals likely to be tossed.") We're not quite far down the well-intentioned Squeamish road to thoughtcrime as the Euros or Iranians, among others, but we do have all these new "civility" laws as allow politicians to gavel down and close off public comment that they don't appreciate. Wish I could say I'd researched the law carefully before punching out Sikes... a moral, if not physical midget... and tossing him down the Capitol steps. Could've appealed to the U.N. - but that would have been wrong. Now, verbal attacks on members of Congress are verboten, now, thanks to Cubelo v. Greenville County School Board. Well, dueling's prohibited too, but things get sort of hazy in the vast, swampy ground between where vicious and virtuous vapours swirl with every partisan breath.

"It is no longer unusual for Republican members of Congress to call the president of the United States a liar," pundit James McCartney twittered during That Monica Thing. You can call the present guy in charge, now, but Dick Cheney's like as not to be holed up in one of his undisclosed locations, dialing for dollars for the upcoming Elephant Man primaries.

Squeamishness is... at its roots... motivated no less by a horror of anybody's death (or wounded feelings) than by an even vaster shrinking from life, an abhorrence of the mysteries of becoming and departing known to any American farm kid up to a few decades ago. "Encountering death," writes Nick Coleman of Minnesota, children "learn to grieve. And grieving is part of loving. And loving is what living is for."

Instead, the Squeamish insist everybody go by the book... though not literally. So them as run the Oregon State Mortuary Board overturned this provision of a dead bait-shop owner's will that asked for his body to be skinned, hide tanned and used to bind books of poetry he'd written. Maybe they had in mind the horror writer, Poppy Z. Brite, who had some of her books proximate to this Communitaryan doofus as tried to molotov a racially incorrect mail store and set himself afire instead... the stench of burning flesh actually making those books collectors' items, and, the gumment having no idea what to do, rare book dealer Barry Levin marked the most fragrant copies up to six hundred dollars.

"Some books sort of sell themselves," Levin admits.

A sort of rough justice attached itself to those Italians, too, as sued CBS. Ol' "Johnny Bago" turned out to stink, badly as those books; so rancidly, in fact, that it was cancelled before NIAF could ever get to court. Some dog of reason'd sniffed them out, stuck its nose into their crotch, and caused God to descend out of an azure of sputtering Sputniks to snatch the roadkill and carry it up to that place, south of Heaven but a ways north of Hell, as go the things and people kil't by their own foolishness. Don't matter how many Squeamish try to save 'em from themselv'n by passing legislation, what's doomed is doomed to die... and what's dead eventually gets burned, eaten, buried or stinks!

Ask one of them House turkeys, pardoned... those PETA folks found out... to some tourist farm out in Virginia where they're made to waddle round out in the cold and gobble for the tourists. Won't happen on my shift!

If those difficulties with al-Qaida, the Costa-Rican solidarian bombers and the Army of Horus, last year, haven't convinced the Squeamish of the existence of real evilment splintering through American skylights, we, at least, ought keep an eye out for such Morlocks as lurk behind the microbrewery.