What a thing it is, to give your life as a soldier for the United States of America. It is such a great giving that no one can repay it, except perhaps by loving this great place with a promise never to take it for granted that freedom is a gift from God that paradoxically men must defend.
I think that America, and I mean America America, not the prospective perversion of it warming in the statist ovens, will survive. But Billy Beck does not think it will survive, and he stands further back from the scene with a better view than almost anyone with a clear angle on it:
This is my working concept, now: that it’s over, and that all that’s left are the particular details of collapse. That will be a rich story in itself, for sure, but we are living a truly unparalleled tragedy. It is unparalleled in that this was the first country in history founded on rational ideals of individualism (even accounting for the original sin of black slavery), and it is a tragedy in that it has been destroyed from within.
Yup, Toynbee relates how great societies end as suicides.
There’s a grinding war now between the people who vote for a living and the people who work for a living. Yesterday the news came that only 42% of income in America comes via the private sector. The rest is taken as taxes and paid to public employees, pensioners, or “clients.” That’s a dependency class with close to a three to two advantage on the private individuals who pay them. That is demographic tragedy, but it was inevitable, not least because it was planned.
At the end, the big joke in the Soviet Union was “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
Let’s pretend, before that day, that it doesn’t have to end that way here, and let’s see whether or not America America, not, again, the prospective perversion of it warming in the statist ovens, will survive. We can go broke either way, but only by the way of freedom can we be rich again, in spirit and wealth.
Break the hold of the state on freedom and individual enterprise and the suffering will only last a generation as the freedom model reasserts itself.
We’ve just witnessed a federal government, under the impress of delusional fools, that in the face of two enormous social entitlement programs — Social Security and Medicare — heading toward bankruptcy responded by adding a third enormous entitlement program. When people stood up and opposed that they were called racists, terrorists, and stupid.
So what it’s going to take is tearing down, for starters, the last two years and then engaging in the greatest method of pooling resources ever invented — it’s called the family — and from that bulwark engaging the downturn and the upheaval so that the return can be eventually witnessed. Make hard times good. But first undo this extended state apparatus and leave it on the ash heap of history. Only freedom works.
You can only please me when you write a line like that.
It’s from The Anchoress as quoted and properly framed by Mike Soja on the subject of the progressive desire for progressing on to dictatorship. The long known perversion nicely restated by the progressives themselves.
The Left worked through academentia, through its media salons, through its sniffs and conceits, through its exhausted disdain for Americans themselves, through deep liars like Chomsky and cracker-barrel Marxists like Zinn.
Finally, the stage was set. The perfect storm blew. And the anti-American President arrived:
Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn don’t mince words on NRO: “Allowing the running down of a part of the United States by the head of a foreign government, at the White House, standing next to the president — who not only didn’t challenge him, but encouraged him — is a foreign- and domestic-policy catastrophe.” I couldn’t agree more with them, or with Mona Charen and Michelle Malkin, who’ve written forcefully about the absurdity of entertaining commentary on our immigration enforcement (or lack of same) from Mexico. That would be the same Mexico that enforces its immigration laws with the very “intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse” of which its president, Felipe Calderón, falsely accuses Arizona.
Rand Paul just won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky. He’s the son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Both are libertarians. Other than being Ron Paul’s son and a libertarian I don’t know much about Rand Paul, although I heard him recently trying to sum up the Tea Party movement and thought that he was considerably off target. I can’t recall, though, exactly what he was saying that made me think that.
After he won the Senate nomination last week he was immediately thrown into a controversy about something he had said about the Civil Rights Act of ‘64. The gist of it is that while Rand Paul was clear that he abhorred racism and segregation and believed that the legal segregation of state government institutions needed to be ended (back in those days “states rights” meant that the states were entitled to their official policies of segregation and it was none of the federal government’s business) that he was uneasy with the idea that the feds would also order private businesses how and with whom to conduct their affairs.
In theory, Rand Paul has a point, but there is something more here than theory, and there are also principles in conflict.
I’ve often written that I believed that the most disappointing element of American history was Jim Crow, which was the creation through law of a segregated society, largely in the American South. Slavery was an ancient institution that the South clung to until the Civil War ended it. It was a beastly practice ended by a beastly war, and that should have been the starting point of something better for both blacks and whites in the South.
Instead, Jim Crow was instituted. It was a system of legal segregation based, one supposes, in nothing but racism. I can’t pretend to read hearts and minds from the 19th Century, but this was something that I believe dishonored the dead from both sides of the Civil War. It was a deeply tragic development because it really was at odds with the founding ideals of America and a profound betrayal of the opportunity provided by the War and the people who had given their lives fighting in it.
So, Rand Paul’s notion that private businesses should not be told how and with whom to do business has to sit in the context of a culture that was created in large part by politics acting through government.
This is something that is very powerful in America: the cultural power of politics working through government. In some of its elements, going back to the American Revolution and its fundamental principles, this cultural power of politics shaped the American character, which in turn shaped the government. It’s a hard thing to untangle. Perhaps Tocqueville did it best in his Democracy in America, but it’s clear to me that Jim Crow was not America at its best. My larger point is that the politics took the sourest notes of the post-War South and then drove the culture into segregation and left it there.
So the point of contention here is not whether the state government practices needed to be desegregated — they did and it should have happened decades earlier — but whether the culture that was driven by the politics through the state governments had to be addressed as well. The Civil Rights Act of ‘64 essentially said to businesses that if you serve the public then you must serve all of the public. Everybody’s money is green. You can no longer refuse to take it from blacks.
The Act took aim at the culture, which the state governments own segregationist practices had helped form, reinforce, and keep in place.
Was it wrong to force private businesses to behave in a certain way and call it a means of enforcing Constitutional rights? Well, it’s not that easy a call. On one hand the CRA makes a business open to the public open to all the public. It does this to end a segregated culture that government itself essentially created and reinforced. On the other hand it tells private businesses how and with whom they must do business, taking away the right to freedom of association.
The CRA gives a new opening to people who were excluded, but it also takes a lot back for government power, and government is always a harsh mistress, even when it acts for the good. Where government is mindful at first, it routinely slips later into mindlessness. And there are people who specialize in working the government boot during that mindlessness. That always happens.
So, the question is has America grown up enough on the race question to now see the CRA of ‘64 as a government (federal) remediation of a cultural curse created and reinforced by government (state) itself?
And if it can be seen as a successful remediation, is it now time to get out of the adolescent phase and let people act on their private interests without further government interference?
In ending the culture of segregation, has government created a new culture of grievance? I would argue that it has and that the new culture is as deleterious in its way as the old one.
There’s no doubt that some businesses might try to resegregate and serve only whites or only blacks. But does anyone believe that most businesses would do that? That any more than a small percentage would devolve back to that state? I have a feeling that it wouldn’t go that way principally on the basis of the opprobrium that would result and the way that it would damage a business’s reputation and therefore its revenue. In general, what I’m saying is that practicing racism would be bad for business, and that the social pressure would be that it’s not acceptable.
Another argument might be that if having or not having the law enforcing this status quo makes no difference, why not just leave the law in place? That’s where the culture of grievance comes in, and the idea that the government is an instrument through which to practice a variety of extortion.
I don’t think that anything is going to change for perhaps another generation, but Rand Paul was not being frivolous by raising this issue about freedom. If the government’s remediation of a government created culture of bias has been successful, and it largely has, then the situation is far enough along to raise the question of whether enough has become too much.
Truthfully, I’ve never read the ‘64 Civil Rights Act, which was certainly a monumental piece of legislation that principally took away the power of state governments to legally segregate their own public institutions. Rand Paul’s libertarian point (I’m assuming some familiarity with the story on the reader’s part, so I’m not going through the whole thing here) about the government also ordering private business owners what to do is a valid question, against which liberals bring the segregated lunch counter example. I’m not yet prepared to discuss it, because I have only just begun, much less finished, thinking about it.
Meanwhile, Billy has his position all staked out.
What made me laugh about his story at the top of the post is that it reminded me of a very similar episode, which I hadn’t thought about in years.
Way back I was in San Francisco for a few months and was out one evening on a walkabout with my Japanese friend Jun Abe. We decided that we needed some drinks and passed a bar that looked like it served them up at workingman’s prices, and without a second thought about where we were we breached the front door. It was an all-black bar, and from the immediate take a rough place, where an asian and a white man might not quite fit in. On the other hand, with all eyes turned toward us, we didn’t want to insult anyone by immediately leaving, so we stepped forward to the bar and had some drinks.
I’ve forgotten the details, but we were treated well enough, and the initial shock of seeing us come through the door faded from the patrons’ faces. They probably decided that we weren’t cops and that we just didn’t know where we were. I think we finished our drinks, maybe had some brief nods and hellos, and left.
My general impression was that that was exactly what was expected of us. I can honestly say that there have been many occasions when I’ve gotten marginally more hostile receptions in largely white bars. The swells could tell I was from the wrong side of the tracks, and dive bar patrons read me as a yuppie.
Anyway, people are people and down in the actual arena of life extending one’s welcome is an art that government forcing probably hurts more than it helps. I’ll think about Rand Paul’s interjection and maybe comment on it later.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who falsely claimed before an audience that he had served in Vietnam, was handed the Democratic nomination for Chris Dodd’s seat in the U.S. Senate. Dodd isn’t running again because voters in Connecticut are tired of what a weird fake he is. So the Connecticut Democrats have found a suitable weird fake to replace him.
Listen to the way the Associated Press reported this development:
HARTFORD, Conn. (May 22) — Criticism aimed at Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal wasn’t enough to keep him from securing the Democratic nomination for Christopher Dodd’s U.S. Senate seat but was sufficient to help political unknown and ex-wrestling executive Linda McMahon get the GOP nod.
“Criticism aimed at…wasn’t enough?” The guy was caught on vid, which was reported in the New York Times, falsely claiming he had served in Vietnam. That wasn’t “criticism.” He was caught in the act.
But the second half of the opening is as cracked as the first. In what sense did the “criticism” of Blumenthal help McMahon. The rest of the story explains how McMahon won the Republican nomination, but the connection to the “criticism” is vaporous.
Never mind. McMahon strikes me as an odd candidate who looks relatively normal side-by-side with Blumenthal, who strikes me as someone…I don’t know, really…I just don’t understand how people like this wind up in high office. The blowhards and pimps have always been around. But this is a new dimension. Or something.
She’s sweet as pie, you jerk.
Billy Beck laments his absence.
What’s been holding the maestro back?
What I loved about the old Usenet battlespace was that the original subject of a post was never much compared to the barroom brawl that followed. You would have to go back to some of those crazy fights in old westerns to find the apt analogy.
This is nothing compared to any of that, but Berlinski’s comeback is better than her original article, that’s for sure. And her original article was pretty good.
So here’s how it went. Berlinski wrote this article for City Journal about two Russian ex-pats who are holding serious paper on the old Soviet regime. Her title, “A Hidden History of Evil,” is provocative, and I think generally on point vis a vis serious inclusion of Soviet horrors in discourse about the history of the Cold War and world Communism.
Ron Radosh, the historian, took exception to Berlinski’s piece, calling it overstated and shoddy reporting. I thought that Radosh’s response was overstated and not particularly strong in its arguments.
But Claire Berlinski was miffed and she responded with vigor. Here is her response, which includes a link to Radosh’s critique. He will probably hit back, so I’ll update this post if and when that happens.
One point Berlinski makes in her response turns the table right over:
I thank Radosh for taking the time to consider my article. I note that we are in agreement about the key point: particularly since the publication of The Black Book of Communism, there are no excuses for not knowing the truth about Communism. I would go further and say that there have been no excuses since the liquidation of the kulaks.
In other words, the publication of The Black Book of Communism a decade ago was a footnote to a reality that was long suppressed but widely known, and it went back to Stalin’s murderings in, among other incidents, the terror famine of the early 1930s. There is a long history of looking away from the Soviet catastrophe, and it continues, regardless of some of the autopsies out there. Berlinski is particularly interested in the complicity of many Western politicians with the Soviets in their endless machinations, in both Europe and America (including the current Vice President of the United States).
Then, I can’t resist this comment by Berlinski, which captures the strain of all this on the contemporary attention span:
As for the rest of Radosh’s comments, I wish I could simply ignore them. A vain academic spat is surely as dispiriting to readers as a long-haul flight with nothing but a volume by Joyce Carol Oates in the seat pocket. But if we must make a big display of our small differences, let’s at least get it over with quickly.
And, yes, that brings me around to getting in my plug for what is essentially my take on all this, my thriller, Corpse in Armor. I take the discussion out of the past and into the present. It’s more than just a novel. And it will keep that long-haul flight very interesting indeed.
I knew there was something skeezy about this guy:
At a ceremony honoring veterans and senior citizens who sent presents to soldiers overseas, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut rose and spoke of an earlier time in his life.
“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”
There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam.
Whenever I see people falling all over someone like that, and I’ve seen precisely that with this guy, I know something’s up. A need to be conned meets the need to con, yes, but in a case like this there’s something more.
Now, let’s see if the madness of crowds rewards him with a seat in the Senate. He is, after all, a Democrat, and so until he’s caught in bed with a dead horse or a live sea lion (have I even gone far enough?), he can basically do anything and Democratic voters will approve, except possibly if he says that he watches Fox News. That would disqualify him.
The vote will take place at the New Paltz High School on South Putt Corners Road.
The voting hours are 12 Noon to 9:00 P.M.
A “No” vote gets you a 2% increase on the average school tax bill.
A “Yes” vote gets you a 3% increase.
So it’s the usual choice between “More” and “More More.” Personally, I can live with just “More” and a “No” vote. My only wish is that the vote, for once, could be for “Less.”
Maybe some day. Stranger things have happened. No one expected the Berlin Wall to come down, either. But as Margaret Thatcher said, eventually they all run out of other people’s money.
Also at stake are two positions on the school board. I don’t care about that, but for his stand with taxpayers against the Middle School bond, Edgar Rodriguez merits some consideration. I don’t think that Edgar and I would agree on much else, and I’m undecided on whether or not to break my policy of not voting for anyone running for the school board and give Edgar some encouragement.
Finally, there is also a proposition on the ballot to purchase two new school buses. That’s a “No” for me as well. Everyone is doing with less these days, and the School District can benefit from learning to make do as well.
(This is cross-posted at NPJ: The Local Edition)
My revelation for today is that Bud Abbott was the really funny one, much funnier than Lou Costello. To walk through it all with that long straight face and seemingly never notice the craziness. Now that was funny. I finally understand why Johnny Carson adored Abbott and fell to pieces on air when he died.
Like country clubbers blowing smoke up their own assess, arguing with strawmen, ignoring facts, categories, and meaning, choosing exemplars that don’t pass the smell test, using the bait and switch (mostly on themselves), and worst of all trying to show how smugly broad-minded they are.
It’s so damned lazy that someone has to be embarrassed for them.
As observed by the most dangerous man in America:
There is an elemental thesis to this book, which is that world socialism was happy to have Islamist terrorism as an ally against America. I heartily agree. This is the largest context of the book: the fact that all kinds of devils will league happily against us precisely because this country is the best thing the world ever saw. Within that context, the action runs fast and hard, but one can always find time for spots of philosophy, even during interrogation.
Among all possible readers I most wondered, and yes worried, what my two friends from the old Usenet battlespace, Beck and Mike Soja, would think about ‘Corpse.’
Neither of those lads has any patience for someone with the effrontery to waste their time, but I think that I did O.K. with them both.
I think that Billy at first dreaded the prospective enterprise of reading the book, for reasons of his own that I wouldn’t try to pry into. But he zipped through it in about a day and a half, which suggests that he succumbed to its fever pace.
I’m duly flattered. As I noted to him, I’m a remorseless layer or tosser aside of books of any kind that don’t grab hold of my attention. So as I wrote ‘Corpse’ I was determined not to let a reader get away once he or she opened the book, and it’s quite gratifying that some of the people who I think of as the really big fish in that reading ocean stayed hooked.
‘Corpse’ is here. You can read the first few pages.
The two high sodoms for the gomorrah sects. Or the pinnacle of variations on Theme One from Handel’s We Own You chorus.
My only quibble would be to put an X5, at least, on the tail of overvalued for two or three decades.
Not to be a reverse snob, but these people follow the program, they don’t think. And I’m not letting George Bush off that hook, although he had the decency not to sink as far down in it as the rest of the crowd.
These are pedigree factories, as opposed to mere degree mills, and pedigrees, you know, are for dogs.