I sit here, in the Alamo of sanity, as the metric fanatics prepare for the final assault. Defending the ramparts alongside me are the mile, the foot, the gallon, and Fahrenheit. I fear that soon there will be another attempt at metrification of the United States. I hope in writing this that others will join me in the gallant crusade of preserving tradition and beauty.

I’ve come across many people who have a visceral hatred for our ancient weights and measures. The metric fan boys take it for granted that everyone agrees with them. Well, there are many of us who don’t. I want to make it clear that this is not a right or left issue. Republicans and Democrats are equally as stupid on this topic.

Metrification is only a small slice of the long march toward efficient ugliness. Dancing has forsaken all beauty and is now just simulated sex. Cars are losing their character, acquiring an insectoid look. Restaurants are all beginning to look like fast food joints. Military dress uniforms are a shade of what they once were. How many men today even own a suit?

I still belong to the minority who would prefer a ship voyage or a train ride to an airplane flight. Why shouldn’t we rejoice in things that are good?

I’m surprised left-wingers aren’t more upset over this. Have we all become Henry Ford? Whatever is most efficient is best, and originality and tradition are obstacles to be demolished, where all cars are black and “history is bunk.” The customary system of measurements is not particularly efficient, but does that make it bad?

The customary system grew like a tree, from centuries of common men doing hard work. Take for example the acre. The acre is based on how much land could be plowed in one day by a team of oxen. The metric system did not grow, it was designed. Imposed from the top like a Soviet five-year plan. It’s very revealing that the communists loved metrification.

The metric system was one of the strange byproducts of the French Revolution. The Jacobin terrorists saw it as a way to dismantle the Ancien Régime. During the course of the 19th and 20th centuries more nations adopted it. Until, finally, all that stood in the breech of freedom were America, Burma and Liberia.

Those in favor of metrification believe themselves to be clever, but is this so? The metric system is based on toe counting, which is stupid, as so much “progress” is. Am I the only person who notices that many numbers aren’t divisible by 10? Like all good things, learning customary units requires patience and practice.

It’s true that in scientific work the toe counting method is preferable. Whenever people are using incredibly small units or complex calculations, the metric system is superior. In everyday life, however, the customary system is far more useful. If we adopt the metric system the Iowa countryside will be measured in hideous “hectares.” How could any civilized human want that?

The struggle between the customary and metric systems is also a tremendous allegory to the battle between freedom and totalitarianism.

Many will be familiar with George Orwell’s “1984.” For those who aren’t, the story takes place in a socialist dystopia. In the eighth chapter an old man walks into a bar and orders a pint of beer. The bartender looks at him and asks, “And what in hell’s name is a pint?” Orwell was way ahead of his time.

Orwell had quite a lot to say about the metric system, and he sums up my position quite nicely. I reproduce here an article he wrote in 1947, “… The metric system does not possess, or has not succeeded in establishing, a large number of units that can be visualized. There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimetre, which is less than half an inch. In English you can describe someone as being five feet three inches high, or five feet nine inches, or six feet one inch, and your bearer will know fairly accurately what you mean. But I have never heard a Frenchman say, ‘He is a hundred and forty-two centimetres high’; it would not convey any visual image. So it is as well with the various other measurements. Rods and acres, pints, quarts and gallons, pounds, stones and hundredweights, are all of them units with which we are intimately familiar, and we should be slightly poorer without them. Actually, in countries where the metric system is in force a few of the old measurements tend to linger on for everyday purposes, although officially discouraged.”