Infected! The Quarantine Of Ideas - A Windowless Gulag Of Identity And Censure

Rene Arguello  was born and raised in a poor family in rural Florida, a mixture of Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban.  His first name, Rene, was given to him by his father who admired the Haitian patriot Rene Dessalines, comrade of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the revolution which led to the country's independence from France to become the first black republic in the Americas and a beacon of democracy and freedom in the world. 

 

Juan Arguello knew something about oppression.  He left Cuba during the worst years of the Batista regime, an autocratic rule that mirrored that of the Shah of Iran or Louis XVI - a presumption of glory, longevity, and admiration by the people, an arrogance which led all three to their revolutionary downfall. 

Juan taught his young son the lessons of freedom, pride and dignity, and the rewarding struggle for political independence, individual freedom, and personal honor.  Juan was as serious and ambitious for his son as the Jews of the old Lower East Side or the Chinese below Houston Street had been. He insisted on hard work, academic success, and a patriotism bred out of the love for his adopted country. 

The Arguello family was poor but never destitute.  Juan easily found work as an agricultural laborer in central Florida and more remunerative employment in one of the many cigar-rolling factories in Tampa.  Ironic, perhaps, thought Juan, working in an occupation as Cuban as he could imagine.  In fact the smell of cigars - the raw tobacco, the smoke from the puros smoked by the gerente, and the unmistakable scent of prime tobacco drying in the sheds of Macana.  

The irony was even more obvious when his son won a scholarship to Lefferts, a New England prep school located in the heart of tobacco country.  Connecticut broad-leaf tobacco was used for the outer wrapping of Cuban, Dominican, and Nicaraguan cigars and gave the product a special, unique draw and character. 

Those days were pre-diversity ones, and Rene was admitted not because of his race but his academic record, his extra-curricular activities, his obvious intelligence, and his neat, proper appearance.  His heritage, although distinctly Caribbean, carried the genes of Spanish grandees, French expatriates, and American adventurers.  He looked fully American. 

Things changed at the small Midwest college where, thanks to the prestigious Thomas Hooker award, a full scholarship prize named after the founder of Connecticut for citizenship and personal honor, he matriculated. Alford College at the time, the early Seventies, had shed all of its farm ethos and had been radicalized just like its sister colleges in the East. 

The reforms of Dean Bradley Clark which opened the college to all not just the sons and daughters of well-heeled burghers, landowners, and agricultural grandees which had been the core of its student body since its founding, the period was one of civil disobedience, student occupations, and the beginning of 'diversity'. 

Rene grew out his hair Afro-style - the white colonial genes were recessive in that category - and he became the darling of the radical student body.  He got religion, a passionate conviction to racial and ethnic justice and he, because of his heritage, became the poster boy for campus revolt. 

He was detained on a number of occasions by the campus police - he was concerned enough about his future to avoid the protests that spilled out into the streets and were subject to municipal police authority - and earned his bars legitimately if not heroically.  He majored in Latin American studies, wrote his senior thesis on the revolutionary struggles of Haiti and Cuba, and had enough academic currency to be accepted to law school.  

His career was set.  He would focus on civil law, especially cases of racial discrimination, and would join government in one of the new specialized agencies overseeing the many new programs designed to prevent racial obstruction and to promote minority integration.  

It is here that the real story of Rene Arguello begins.  Something happened to him in his late thirties which changed him from a committed social justice advocate to a true believer - the cause of the black man was not just one of social inclusion but of righteousness and retribution.  It wasn't enough to open doors for easier admission, nor to challenge each and every insult to his racial integrity. Rene had to see to it that the black man was raised to the top of the pinnacle of the human pyramid.  He felt not only the weight of the law but his own personal racial destiny - an imperative, ineluctable demand to right America's direction. 

To do so was not only to promote the black man and other oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, but to launch a frontal attack on the oppressor himself- the white man, the colonial master, the overseer, the brutal racial dictator, the implacably racist, immoral, reprobate.  It wasn't long before hatred displaced reason entirely. 

The sociologist and longtime observer of the American political scene, Hamilton College Professor Emeritus Arnold Frampton, wrote this in an article to The American Journal of Sociology

True belief is a viral infection, invading the cellular structure of reason and good judgment and turning the believer into an automaton of received wisdom.  Once infected the true believer, like the zombies of Night of the Living Dead or Invasion of the Body Snatchers is compelled to infect others until the world is completely overtaken.  

There is no reason, no objectivity, no rational thought possible once the virus has taken hold.  Today's progressives are like body snatchers, an invasive species propelled by nothing less than some kind of inner compulsion bred of rapidly accelerating intellectual erosion. 

 

One would have thought that Rene, brought up with such moral rectitude in an environment of positivism and hope, would have become a reasonable advocate for legitimately-needed change and not the rabid, bilious hater he had become.  Professor Frampton weighed in:

True belief is insidiously compromising.  It not only crowds out reason and rational conclusions, it pushes consideration and generosity aside until there is no room for anything but virulent, increasingly violent, excoriating hatred.  There is only so much space within the human psyche, a space which is easily filled up with meanness and ignorance. 

Rene began to look at everyone through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity; and based on what he saw he either accepted or summarily dismissed, cancelled, and removed.  There was no opinion, consideration, or judgment which could sway him from the progressive canon.  

Any criticism of the black man - the persistent dysfunction of the inner city, the disproportionate rates of violent crime and incarceration, the abysmally low rates of academic performance, the lack of social cohesion - was met with accusations of racism. 

To use Prof. Frampton's words, the 'insidious viral invasion' of true belief infected every aspect of Rene's vision.  Received wisdom became canon, ex cathedra Biblical truth.  The climate was warming due to man's ignorance.  The newly-cited evidence that Antarctic was gaining ice and that the north polar cap was not losing it, that earth temperatures had shown no more than normal geological fluctuations was dismissed out of hand.  Gender choice was not preference but biological reality. 

'Eventually the virus kills the host', said Prof. Frampton. 'The true believer lives incarcerated within his ever narrowing gulag of ignorance until eventually he rots and dies'. 

True belief, however, is still alive and well, so its disappearance is not around the corner; but the epidemic is slowing.  More and more Americans see the naked emperor with his clothes off - there is no there there, the apocalyptic visions are no more than Chicken Little, sky is falling, fantasy. 

As for Rene? His rabidness is taking its toll.  He is emotionally drained and intellectually weary. However often he might shuffle, hoist himself with difficulty from the sofa, forget his medication, or wander about thinking it's Tuesday, he still worships at the altar, does his ablutions and says his prayers for the coming of Utopia. 

 'Not on my watch', he mumbles as he gets out of bed in the morning, not quite sure what that watch is, but steady as she goes. 

A sad story? A tragedy? Only an apocryphal warning.  'Pull up on the reins, Bobby Boy, or you'll find yourself in Blodgett's Creek', he remembers Tom Mix saying to his young nephew on the matinee screen at the Strand theatre in Tampa.  'Now, why did I think of that?' Rene asked himself.