There’s a bit of a to-do in the blogosphere regarding the recent hiring of Kevin “Mattress Face” Williamson1 by the Atlantic, one that leaves me, remarkably enough, on the side of the ululating left, who are (mostly) mad at Kev’s pathetically “provocative” “jest” that women who get abortions should be hung.2
I don’t think old Kev is all that funny or incisive or anything else. Just because he’s an anti-Trump conservative, which are rather the rage among what I would loosely describe as the “neocon libs”—people like Washington Post editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt, New York Times editorial page honcho Joseph Kahn,3 and (surprise) Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg—is no reason to give him a job. To generalize wildly (and why not? It’s after five!), all these people are deeply disgusted that Donald Trump is president and want to build whatever coalitions they can.
Well, Kevie boy is not the kind of guy I would nominate as a coalition builder of any sort. I’ve railed a number of times at his brand of “high-low” bad-ass snottiness, and I’m going to do so again, hoisting Mr. Mattress Face on his own petard, via a link Kev provided on the occasion of his farewell to his former employer, the National Review, praising the magazine for allowing him to pursue his “weird little interests — monetary policy in the French Revolution, the techniques of capital punishment, the epistemic problems of political action.”
It was the link to the “monetary policy of the French Revolution” that I followed, a piece written in 2011 and titled rather grandly “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and bearing the subhead “What happens when you cut off heads instead of credit”.
In appearance, Mr. Williamson, with both a bald head and a full, stark, black beard,4 resembles a bouncer at the Ramrod, but his prose is a different matter. Like not a few fellow scribes at the NR, Mr. Williamson treads predictably in the pseudo-mandarin footsteps of William F. Buckley, whom I also generally did not like, emulating Bill’s systematically sesquipedalian prose, an artifice constructed for the purpose of allowing the author to fill up space without the bother or the burden of actually having something of substance to say.5
Kevin begins his essay on French monetary policy with a whimsical, five-paragraph digression on the career of Andrew White, co-founder of Cornell University, among other things, and tireless crusader on behalf of the gold standard, followed by several dozen paragraphs of learned snickering at the folly of the paper money issued by the revolutionary government(s) of France, known then (and now) as assignats, accompanied by frequent sidewise glances at, you know, modern times, to underline the obvious moral that one Barack Obama was taking America down the same road as Robespierre. So you get the picture: Gold money, good! Paper money, bad!
But here’s the thing: France wasn’t the only country to go off the gold standard way back in 1797; the British government did it too, and didn’t bother to go back on until 1819. The U.S. issued paper money during both our Revolutionary War and our Civil War, both of which “we” won. Of course, FDR took us off the gold standard entirely in 1933—to the unanimous horror of all contemporary economists and to the universal approbation of all current ones—and we’ve done rather well ever since.
Kevin concludes his learned essay with the following, supposedly crushing, paragraph:
“According to Cambridge Modern History: French Revolution, the compte rendu of 1788, the final budget presented to Louis XVI — the one that sparked the crisis that ultimately unleashed the revolution and all that came after — featured a deficit of about 30 percent of government spending. Barack Obama’s last one was 46 percent. In May, Paul Krugman began calling for QE3 — ‘both larger and broader-based than QE2.’ Napoleon put France back on gold and vowed that he’d die before he saw paper money being issued again, but he also wore funny hats and wasn’t nearly as enlightened as us.”
Well, guess what, Kev? We’re still not on the gold standard, and Barack Obama took us through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression using sound, Keynesian/Krugmanite principles, giving the U.S. the largest, strongest economy in the world. I’m considerably richer today than in 2008, and I’ll bet Mr. Williamson is too—that is, if he had enough sense to invest in the stock market, rather than, you know, gold.
Afterwords
Mr. Williamson’s supposedly conclusive citation regarding the size of Louie’s last budget is laughable if you know anything about French history. For almost a century, the French monarchy could not borrow money on the open market, unlike Great Britain. Instead, it borrowed through private deals with a few large bankers, replete with secret understandings and hidden payoffs. But by 1788 no one would buy French bonds on any terms whatsoever. The Bourbons went bust for the most bourgeoise of reasons: no one would lend them money. Throughout the recent Great Recession, on the other hand, inflation in the U.S. remained low, and U.S. Treasuries were regarded as the safest investment one could make, all around the globe.
- If you’re as old as I am (probably not) you might know that it was once funny to say that someone with a full beard had a face “like a burst mattress”, which, in turn, was funny only if you knew that mattresses were once upon a time stuffed with such “ticking” as straw, or horsehair, or even corn shucks , which inevitably contained corn cobs, to Huckleberry Finn’s memorable discomfort: “there’s always cobs around about in a shuck tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and when you roll over the dry shucks sound like you was rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it makes such a rustling that you wake up.” Huck would be amazed at our modern orthopedic marvels. ↩︎
- Under English common law, abortion prior to “quickening” was not considered a homicide. If any woman who obtained an abortion, or any doctor who performed one, has been executed in the U.S. for that “crime”, I have seen no evidence of it. But I guess Kevie Boy needed some clicks. ↩︎
- Kahn is the editorial page editor for the Times but I don’t know if he makes the hiring decisions. Please do not base any conspiracy theories on this post. ↩︎
- Does the carpet match the drapes? He’ll never tell. ↩︎
- Buckley, in turn, picked this up from such previous worthies such as H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock. ↩︎
