You can be sure of very few things in life. Here are two. a) Given one fly, one glass of Scotch, one room, it therefore follows inevitably that the fly will commit suicide in the glass before your drink is half finished. Always happens. Used to be ointment, now it’s Scotch, b) There will be at least one, or an average of two, noticeably left-liberal articles in any month’s Natural History magazine. I’ve read every word printed by NH over the last three years. If leftism accumulates in the tissues, as they insist DDT does, then I’d better airmail my next Gimlet Eye to Rolling Stone. For an instance, let’s take NH’s April ’75 issue, which comes in at about twice the lethal dose.
1. An article by Morton Fried called “The Myth of the Tribe.” “Tribe,” you understand, has been proscribed by Third World nations: the word connotes primitivism and savagery. Fried hypothesizes that the tribal structure was invented by encroaching colonial states, as a device to oppress indigenous peoples. I’m no anthropologist, but I can tell hawks from handsaws when an author is fudging. And Fried fudges like some unprepared high school sophomore. Note the affirmative, forceful tone of this sentence: “However the thought may disturb us, all human societies larger than the immediate band or village were of the vaguest dimensions and boundaries.” Positive, huh? Scientific sounding. Here’s the very next sentence, “Admittedly, this is a difficult, perhaps impossible statement to prove.” Nonetheless Fried treats it as if proven for several thousand words. Liberal scientists deal in direct revelation when the cue cards are flashing Third World propaganda. “As a precondition for their manipulation, exploitation, and, ironically, their expropriation they [the indigenous people] had to be pinned down.”
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