The Elitist Blueprint

©1992

By James Lester

Part 1 of 2 [8 min.]

It was a bright, breezy afternoon in Marin. My friend and I were sitting in Bogie's Restaurant sipping Espresso, nibbling English Muffins. I was telling him how proud I was that our economic system had brought the blessings of Democracy and equal opportunity to all our people. I hailed government efforts to remove the stigma of the welfare system from the poor people of America, and the inspirational message to them to take full advantage of the opportunities available in this great nation of ours.

My friend responded by reminding me of our ghettos, larger and dirtier than ever; the poor quality of education for minorities and poor people; their poor health; the fatherless families; the homeless.

I said all that would change as soon as the inferior (unassimilable) members of our society die out; that I had been talking about those Americans who could contribute to our economy and adequately reflect our national values.

My friend looked at me for a long moment. I knew from the hunch of his shoulders and the tightness of his grip on the coffee cup that I had touched a nerve. Finally, he relaxed.

"Let me tell you a little story about our American democracy," he said.

---

Imagine a condition in which all of us have nearly the same decent standard of living, and we all think of each other as equal. Each of us has an equal voice in government and at our job. But you and I don't like this "sameness." We want more. We think we deserve more, but we can't get anyone else to agree.

Since we can't convince anyone that we're superior, maybe we can trick them into thinking that some others are inferior. Our problem is how to identify those whom we'll say are inferior.

How about this? We'll take a significant number of women. We'll mark them and their husbands in a way that distinguishes them from all other citizens and will be passed on to their children.

Now, we'll deprive these women, when they get pregnant, of proper prenatal care and nutrition. This'll ensure that some of their children will be afflicted with abnormalities of body and brain.

Then we'll refuse to employ their husbands at jobs paying enough money to support their families, so they'll run away from the impossibility of fulfilling their obligations.

This'll leave the children with the poorly nourished mothers. The children will be poorly nourished and will grow up in an atmosphere of deprivation in dysfunctional families. When they grow old enough to bear children, their children will be malnourished and deprived, too.

Now, we'll place this population in the middle of the rest of us so that not only will they see how well the rest of us unmarked citizens are doing, but we can see how poorly they're doing.

Nothing new, here. [It's the same thing the Third Reich did to Germany's Jewish population.]

But, this is where we'll have to be careful and use our heads. We don't want compassionate unmarked citizens to restore this marked population to health and equality by sharing with them. After all, these marked citizens are essentially the same good people as our unmarked citizens.

Really, we won't have to worry too much. As soon as the marked population sees how well unmarked citizens are doing, they'll be angry and some will steal what they need from them. That'll make our unmarked citizens good and mad.

But, just to make sure, we'll say the marking can be spread into the unmarked population by sexual activity; that this "disease" can be spread just by contact. We'll point out how retarded some of the children are; how lazy and undependable the husbands are; how uneducated and neglectful the mothers are. We'll demand that this population be kept apart from our population.

You and I are on a roll, now. People are looking "up" to us.

By now, the unmarked population is happy to despise the marked population. They'll go along with any of our suggestions about how to manage them. We'll tax our unmarked population to pay for that management. They'll be furious that they have to pay for the marked population. We'll make sure that anger is directed at the marked population for being needy, not at us for imposing the tax.

Let's have a name for them. Marks. That's good. Sounds like a "thing," doesn't it? It's always easier to despise "things." We're People. They're marks.

We'll tell People it's OK not to like marks (who would?). And we'll tell them we hope marks die out soon, so we can all be the same, again.

But, really, we don't want that, because our population would grow to fill in for them, and we'd have to share with them, again. Then we'd lose this game we're playing.

So, how about a little "double-think"? We notice that the increased ease of life among People is resulting in an increase in abortions. We really don't care about unborn babies, only ones that are born. But, we do want to keep the balance of numbers between our two populations constant.

Let's call abortion a crime, unless a woman can pay for it herself. How clever of us! We know that most People-women can afford abortion; can travel wherever needed to get it. So, we'll increase and decrease our "moral" outcry against abortion to control its frequency in People-women.

We also know that few mark-women will be able to afford abortion. That's good, though, because they already have a high infant mortality rate on account of the way we treat them. So, it's important that they bear as many mark-children as possible. Just to seem fair, though, we'll push contraception among mark-women, knowing the mark-men won't buy it. They'll know what we're doing.

Now, we'll tell People that marks should limit the size of their families because of their disabilities, and People will be angry when they don't.

The fringe benefit, here, is that we can claim that we're just as concerned for marks as we are for People. What could be more fair? But, more importantly, we also have a new crime to despise marks for, because, of course, there'll be many illegal abortions among mark-women.

What else can we do? We already employ marks at a lesser salary than we do People. So, what about schooling? Let's give good educations only to People, so they can do sophisticated things for us. We'll give poor educations to marks so they can never threaten People by learning highly paid skills. Who'd want to teach among marks, anyway?

How about drugs? We like drugs, don't we? Lots of People like drugs. But, they're a legal problem, so we can't take them as easily as we'd like. We can't change the law on such a sensitive subject; too many People want it the way it is. But, we can influence sentencing to make it a serious crime to sell drugs and a minor one to use them. In fact, we can even call the use of drugs by People a disease, while claiming the use of drugs by marks is evidence of selling. That way, People who use them don't have to go to jail; only the marks do.

Not the best solution, I know, but one that's useful to us, because we can recruit marks as sellers and jail them if they're caught. Of course we'll have to give the drugs to marks at first. They don't make enough money to buy them from us. And marks will have to sell the drugs to People, not other marks, for the same reason.

Now, People can have as many drugs as they want, but marks go to jail for it. Kind of like the "whipping boy" trick of European royalty. And, if some marks get rich, that's OK, they'll attract other marks to the business. After all, it'll be the only way they can make "People-class" money. If People who don't like drugs complain, we can blame the problem on marks without having to tell People where the drugs came from.

By now, we have so many crimes we can charge marks with, that we can claim their "mark" is a sign of "the criminal mind." Also, so many marks are involved in our justice system, that it will be easy to keep track of them in case of an "uprising."

Did you know there are populations of people in other countries that are marked, too? Not the same mark as the one we gave to ours, but marked, nonetheless. Let's bring them in and use them for cheap labor in our fields, our factories, our mines. Let them do the work it's hard for us to get People to do any more. We'll set them up the same as we did our own marks. Their customs are already different than ours. All we have to do is make those differences a crime or a sin or claim they're evidence that foreign marks are as bad as domestic marks.

[Go to Part 2 of 2]