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Fall 2005 -- Jack Criss, Ready, Aim, Right! Quail Ridge Press, 2004, 224 pages (softcover), $12.95.
Jack Criss is a journalist. But his passion is business, and for well over a decade that passion has spilled over onto the pages of Mississippi publications, where he writes on business, politics, and philosophy. His book, Ready, Aim, Right!, compiles his wide-ranging editorials, commentaries, essays, and columns, revealing a man of uncommon principle, courage, and independence.
While a teen, Criss immersed himself in the late twentieth-century counterculture. He became a long-haired Buddhist who accepted liberal social ideas and who admired the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By chance, however, he was introduced to the writings of Ayn Rand . That turned his life turned upside-down, and has had a lasting impact on his ideals and values. “I went from being a long-haired hippy to a tight-lipped, rationalistic Objectivist,” he says, poking a bit of fun at himself.
Criss has since established solid credentials as a communicator and businessman. For years a popular local radio talk show host––and an “easy listen” because of his gracious Southern accent and demeanor—Criss interviewed a host of controversial intellectuals, including Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, William F. Buckley, Jr., Robert Bork, Jesse Jackson, Leonard Peikoff, Michael Kinsley, Fred Barnes, Charles Murray, and Allan Bloom.
He also learned how to create profits in the publishing world. He has built newspapers and sold them. Currently he owns, publishes, and edits the Metro Business Chronicle, a monthly newspaper based in Jackson, Mississippi. Recently he began writing biographies and children’s books about admirable individuals. His first children’s book will be The Great Greek Philosopher: Aristotle for Kids. “My four-year-old daughter, Dagny, knows who Aristotle is,” he says proudly. As if all that weren’t enough, Criss expects to launch two more newspapers and possibly a new business in 2006. “I know where I want to be in ten years,” he says firmly. “I want to own a string of successful businesses in publishing and write several more books.”
“My four-year-old daughter, Dagny, knows who Aristotle is,” Criss says proudly.
Criss becomes livid when he reads articles in business publications like The Wall Street Journal that attack or undermine the principles of capitalism. “All kinds of anti-capitalist bromides have slipped into journalism,” he fumes. That, in part, motivated him to own publications where he could write about individual rights and the workings of capitalism. “Fundamentally, I am an entrepreneur defending the capitalist ethic,” he says. “I am a passionate defender of business because I think business has to have a defense.”
Ready, Aim, Right! is one result. It’s Jack Criss’s brash critique of social ills, the corruption of politicians and educators, the multiculturalist misuse of “diversity” to address racial problems—coupled with his ringing defense of laissez-faire capitalism.
Criss writes for the common man, and his provocative essays can excite controversy within 300 words. That said, Criss is no Thomas Paine pamphleteer. His thoughts rush onto paper very much in the manner of a radio talk show host, sometimes swinging from idea to idea without measured judgment. That’s understandable for a columnist who must turn out copy fast and on deadline. Those knowledgeable about Objectivism will wish at times that he might mint some fresh terms, and not fall back on the familiar Objectivist rhetoric. Nevertheless, he takes on today’s issues with principles, and with a vengeance. If that’s what you want to read in the popular press, Jack Criss is your man.
Though some might categorize Criss as a libertarian, he calls himself an Objectivist—and it shows. He extols the profit motive and explains why it is critical to our personal success. He writes with passion about his heroes, defending business giants like Microsoft’s Bill Gates against antitrust charges and mean-spirited media attacks. He bluntly declares that money is the root of all good—and he is just as candid in essays on voting, popular culture, government regulation, and much more. Nor is he a partisan: he criticizes Democrat and Republican politicians alike, and frets when Republicans abandon their traditional principles of limited government. As for left-wingers, he loathes them as moral hypocrites, asserting that their only motive is to enslave people.
Criss’s commentaries on the welfare state and cultural decay are especially logical and refreshing. “I am disheartened about the decline of popular culture,” he said in an interview. “It infuriates me––these feminists, for example, who tried to empower women by encouraging their sexuality as a passkey to success. They wrought the misogyny.” He also faults feminists in part for the growing obscenity on TV, in the movies, on the Internet, in books and video games. But he is dismayed by the response of conservatives. “If you want to look at pornography in your own home, that’s great. But, I abhor the reaction from the Right to censor it.”
In one article, Criss demonstrates the contradiction of forcing people to volunteer via “national service” programs. He is not opposed to volunteerism as a choice. But today, he writes, “service and volunteerism are the user-friendly buzzwords for disguised slavery.” He rankles at the fact that Republicans and Democrats alike have endorsed “the perverse notion that we ‘owe’ something back to our communities.” What, he demands, did we take from our communities in the first place? In an October 1997 essay he demonstrates the fundamental injustice of this claim. When students sued their schools in Pennsylvania, New York, and North Carolina for insisting upon volunteerism as a requirement for graduation, they won their lawsuit. But the school in Bethlehem, Pa., refused to award the students their diplomas.
“Service and volunteerism are the user-friendly buzzwords for disguised slavery.”In another column he decries the perpetuation of welfare, noting that “the Government produces nothing and funds itself strictly with what it confiscates from those of us who do produce.” To Criss, welfare is “a faceless, nameless, money-grabbing game the government plays for those who either can’t take care of themselves, or won’t.” And it is a morally bankrupt system: “Need is elevated to forcible entitlement. Responsibility is thus downplayed since the welfare state confers entitlements to goods independent of…the process of earning them.”
Criss is at his incendiary best as he skewers the environmental movement. “The loose, but quite powerful, aggregate of organizations and activists known as environmentalists has one consistent theme in all of its back-to-nature rhetoric: the sacrifice of man to its cause,” he charges. “Their goal is to shut down industry, stop production and return civilization back to a state where bison and butterflies were in abundance but man lived in caves.” He abhors the concept of “Earth Day,” suggesting instead that we should have “a Producers Day where we celebrate the accomplishments of business and the quality-of-life capitalism provides us.”
He also rails against public schools and many university intellectuals for promoting “blind egalitarianism, primacy of feelings, relativism, and an outright assault on Western culture.” About politicians he is biting in his contempt. “They are pompous enough to have us believe that they can regulate everything about our lives. Politics and government have become all intrusive…. Politicians would like us to believe that the government can do it all. It’s all about control.”
Such outspokenness is rare among businessmen, and Criss walks a fine line as a publisher who depends on the voluntary support of advertisers. In fact, some recently cancelled their ads in his newspaper because of his stand on a particular issue. Criss is unfazed; he accepts the fact that that is their right.
But that reaction is the exception in the Mississippi regional business community, where many admire him. “Most people agree with what I’m saying,” he says. Readers tell him that they have been influenced by his ideas, and—as one local CPA put it—have been prompted to “reexamine their positions on the key issues of everyday life.”
Still, Criss fears for our children’s generation. “I’m a pessimist,” he tells me. “We’re heading for a Dark Age, just running on the fumes of the Enlightenment. I argue for objectivity, the existence of truth, and the fact that things are knowable. If we don’t have the intellectual and moral courage to stand up for Western Civilization, we are doomed, because our freedoms are being eroded daily.”
Criss acknowledges, though, that he writes for the sake of his daughters––four-year-old Dagny and 13-year-old Katie––as much as for himself.
Maybe he isn’t such a pessimist after all.
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