Culture – Page 38 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

February 21, 2020February 23, 2020

Sadly, Remembering Parkland, 2/14/2018

People distant from an event have a tendency to nationalize it. The occurrence is shoe-horned into some broader issue, or, better yet for activists, a politically opportune crisis. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman High School would descend into the gutter of national gun-control politics. The most impactful circumstances surrounding the shooter are glazed over in the pursuit of a hot-button issue. Useful lessons are avoided as the coffers fill with contributions from any number of frightened citizens and well-heeled political exploiters (Michael Bloomberg, et al).

The most relevant facts, though, are those that directly relate to the cultprit. Right there, we find a convoluted and perplexing school discipline policy – the Promise program – in the school district, all meant to dilute the reality of bad behavior in the classroom, no matter the violator’s background. The result is a discipline system that few can understand, including the miscreant. The old rule of investing applies: if you don’t understand it, don’t do it.

The second factor to come out of the horrid affair is the insipid reactions of our public employees up and down the federal system. Take district superintendent Runcie and his use of gross and misleading numbers to defend his discipline system that in reality can’t and won’t remove real threats. Disgusting. Or the behavior of local law enforcement to refuse to enter the building to stop the shooter. Or the school’s security personnel who saw the guy coming and did nothing to stop him. Appalling. Or the warnings coming from citizens over a number of years to authorities about the shooter’s disturbing behavior. Warnings were plenty, and unheeded.

This only proves that real public safety begins with personal responsibility of the individual citizen. That’s the reason for the Second Amendment. Gun-free zones are in practice safe zones for killers.

Crass language would refer to the Parkland incident as one huge government “cluster #$&?@”. Either way you cut it, it was an entirely avoidable disaster … if government worked as designed in its flow chart. Fact is, it seldom does.

Instead, we get the parade of demagogues who promise a more centralized and bureaucratized version of the same. A good place to find them was on the stage Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas.

The lineup of demagogues in Las Vegas, Feb. 19, 2020.

Are We Irreconcilably Divided as a Nation?

Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute says “yes”. In a presentation before an audience at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, Caldwell lays out his diagnosis of our current rupture. It’s an argument worth serious consideration.

In a nutshell, Caldwell sees the country split into winners and losers, purported villains and heroes, and the much-abused oppressed and oppressor. I attribute it to Marxist theory seeping into the schools, media of almost any type, and the broader culture. Caldwell views it as a byproduct of the extension of our civil rights crusade beyond any prudent limit. He asserts that it created a second constitution – a subversion of the original one. The second and unratified constitution created law by bureaucratic and judicial decree, and began to short-circuit popular sovereignty. Then, all began to notice that they were, without approval, placed into the categories of winners and losers, villains and heroes, and the oppressed and oppressors.

For me, the Marxist paradigm entered the social bloodstream from the cultural commanding heights of our urban centers. It’s there that we find it lavishly evident in our faculty lounges, urban political machines, media headquarters, and even the corporate boardroom. Thus, the much talked-about blue/red divide.

Caldwell, though, has a point. He illustrates how a noble cause – civil rights, equal protection, etc. – can fall down the rabbit hole of malign governance. Please read the speech in the latest edition of Imprimis.

RogerG

February 16, 2020February 16, 2020

McCabe’s Non-prosecution and DC

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in Washington, U.S., June 7, 2017. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

If what your enemies say about you can amount to a claim of credibility, then Andrew C. McCarthy passes the test. He’s been lambasted by the Dem-Left as a hack and Trumpkins as a partisan of the “deep state”. They are both wrong. As a seasoned US attorney, he tries to objectively see the subject from many angles. When looking at the McCabe case, his analysis may not be dispositive but it lacks the hyperbole often found on MSNBC and the Trump-o-philes on Fox News. In McCarthys’ rendering, as I discern it, the McCabe case stinks of DC.

The DOJ’s decision not to pursue prosecution of McCabe has 3 factors swirling about. First, it’s hard to convict when star witnesses for the prosecution (like Lisa Page) are twisting testimony to the advantage of the defense.

Second, Trump smears the criminal justice process with his Tweet-rants. It’s hard to convict when all involved are continually exposed to announcements from the White House that the defendant is a “liar”, etc. The president as the ultimate chief prosecutor is mucking up the constitutional right to a fair trial. He has a “right” to free speech, as Hannity is wont of saying, but his “right” clashes with the “rights” of others. If Trump was a prosecutor – which he is as chief executive – he’d be sanctioned by the court. And he does this in DC, a place already with a deep and popular disdain for him and Republicans in general.

That leads me, finally, to the messy matter of a forever-tainted jury pool in DC. Overwhelmingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment are so deeply embedded in the DC population that Democrats are more-likely-than-not to skate. The story of the jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial is a good case in point. For prosecutors of any Obama associate, they’d have to get beyond jury selection from a broad Resistance demography. It’d be like getting a conviction in a lynching case in the Deep South after Reconstruction. Currently in DC, a prominent Republican in the dock would get a hang ’em jury and a Democrat would have the advantage of jury nullification (a blanket refusal to convict). In DC, just remove the blindfold from the statue of the lady of justice.

All the more reason to strip DC of many of its administrative functions. Ship them out to environs less congenial. Pick a Midwestern state. Otherwise, we’ll be saddled with an unhinged and Democrat-dominated federal government for as far as the eye can see. Elections, all of a sudden, become less important. Were they ever, at least since FDR?

RogerG

February 15, 2020February 15, 2020

Today’s Recommendation: ESPN’s “30 for 30: Michael Vick”

Much has been made of the urban/rural divide in America. It’s real and shows in many ways. The reactions in the Michael Vick dogfighting case are emblematic of the split. Federal prosecutors, the press (mostly urban), and urbanites emitted a profound revulsion. Most of Vick’s neighbors may have disapproved – or not – but didn’t see it as the equivalent of serial capital rape.

The local DA decided not to charge, reflecting in a sense the values of his hometown. The principle of subsidiarity (overwhelmingly most government should be local) is an unstated truth in our governmental system, and active here.

The immense publicity and concomitant mostly urban outrage stepped up the case to a more distant level: the feds. For city slickers (of which I’d have to include myself), anything is justified to get the abuser of the counterpart of the beloved family pet. The prosecutors, appropriately pedigreed in universities and suburban upbringings, turned the immense powers of the federal government on Vick. He went from shame and no charges to two years in a federal lockup. His life’s preparation and career were emasculated.

Michael Vick leaves federal prison in 2009 to serve the last few months of his sentence in home confinement.

Cock and dogfighting, and animal abuse in general, should be criminalized. No doubt. But this is a case of proportionality. For suburbanites, their personal exposure to animals is limited to Fido. For many childless adults – of which there are increasing numbers in our cities – Fido is a surrogate son or daughter to shower all their love and wealth. They’d sooner see Vick drawn and quartered. For Vick’s neighbors, it’s yawner.

The drawing and quartering of François Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV of France, 1610.

For me, a conviction, fine, probation, and all the bad publicity and shame that he heaped upon himself would be sufficient. For sheltered suburbanites, who would consider a lesson on Lewis and Clark’s eating of their dogs and horses to survive the Rockies to be akin to the distribution of child pornography, nothing short of waterboarding and a decade in Supermax would do.

Michael Vick recounts his journey to a restored faith to students at Liberty University on Jan. 29, 2018.

See the 2-part program. You can get it on ESPN’s “On Demand”.

RogerG

February 8, 2020February 8, 2020

All Those Years Ago

John Lennon and George Harrison in the heady days of the Beatles.

While listening to Pandora during my exercise routine, I was reacquainted with a much-loved tune by George Harrison, “All Those Years Ago”. It is a tribute to John Lennon. My mind turned to the symbiotic relationship between words and music. A lovely tune can make words have a strong pull on our sentiments and carry with them the ring of truth. Words standing alone can be easily rejected, but wrap them up in music and they can seem like the siren call of the angels. Yet, are they? I think not.

George Harrison and John Lennon of The Beatles talking to the press and media at Bangor following the news of the death of their manager Brian Epstein, 27th August 1967. (Photo by Stephen Shakeshaft/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

With deep sincerity, Harrison turns Lennon into something of a wise prophet when he refers to two of Lennon’s songs: “Imagine” and “All You Need Is Love”. Harrison recalls that others saw his friend as “so weird”. Yes, Lennon was caricatured as “weird”, and in a sense he was. I don’t mean in the literal meaning of the word. Lennon absorbed an emerging ethos of the 60’s that the world’s problems could be cured with “love”. Now that’s weird, and categorically wrong. Separating “love” from God and espousing a sterile and secularized form of it, as Lennon does in “Imagine”, leaves us with a longing for a vacuous impossibility: the universal embrace of a love-without-God. It’s self-defeating and ignores the reality of ourselves and our experience.

From the June 25, 1967 One World broadcast of “All You Need is Love.”

I fully empathize with Harrison’s purpose in his striving to fondly remember his dear friend, but his dear friend came to symbolize in the public imagination much that was wrong with the counter-culture and peace movement. We are still living with the consequences in our drug epidemics, a promiscuity that has emasculated the family, and a self-centeredness that has brought many to ruin.

Opioid addict. “Getting high” became therapeutic in the 1960’s. The falsehood entered the social mainstream in a big way after the 1960’s.

Oh well, enjoy the tune. Ironically, I find it to be one of Harrison’s best.

Here are the lyrics, if you’re interested:

I’m shouting all about love
While they treated you like a dog
When you were the one who had made it so clear
All those years ago

I’m talking all about how to give
They don’t act with much honesty
But you point the way to the truth when you say
“All you need is love”

Living with good and bad
I always looked up to you
Now we’re left cold and sad
By someone, the devil’s best friend
Someone who offended all

We’re living in a bad dream
They’ve forgotten all about mankind
And you were the one they backed up to the wall
All those years ago
You were the one who imagined it all
All those years ago.

Deep in the darkest night
I send out a prayer to you
Now in the world of light
Where the spirit free of lies
And all else that we despised

They’ve forgotten all about God
He’s the only reason we exist
Yet you were the one that they said was so weird
All those years ago
You said it all though not many had ears
All those years ago
You had control of our smiles and our tears
All those years ago.

All those years ago …
All those years ago …
All those years ago …

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: George Harrison
All Those Years Ago lyrics © Sm Publishing (poland) Sp. Z O.o., Umlaut Corporation (ascap)

RogerG

January 31, 2020January 31, 2020

There’s No Cure for Stupid

Laurence Fox and Rachel Boyle in the dust-up on the BBC’s The Question.

How do people make themselves, for want of a better word, stupid? People are normally rational beings (maybe I’m too optimistic), so how do they end up … stupid? One possible answer is that they believe in fictions. Turning an untruth into truth is quite a feat, and the source of much misery when it is pronounced by people with a media bullhorn. One fount of “stupid”with a patina of academic glamour is identity politics and its conferring of “wokeness” on its adherents.

I define “identity politics” as the attempt to assign virtue and vice to people according to immutable qualities such as melanin count and genitalia. A subsidiary precept is the dualism of oppressor/oppressed for which all people must descend, as based on the aforementioned unchangeable personal characteristics – something any dyed-in-the-wool Marxist would find familiar. The result is a profusion of baloney. But woe be to those caught in the snares of the woke cadres, as Laurence Fox soon discovered.

An example of a dolt on parade was broadcast to the world in the BBC’s Question Time when a supposed “academic”, Rachel Boyle, leveled the banality of “racism” at Laurence Fox for his skepticism about sending all criticism of the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, into the “racism” black hole (“black” being no attempt at cultural appropriation).

Take a look.

Boyle has all the academic credentials of wokeness, she being a lecturer and researcher in race and ethnicity at Edge Hill University in Lancashire. The amazing thing about her is the seriousness and self-confidence in her batty denunciations of Fox. She strings together pejorative epithets like a latter-day Muhammed Ali at one of his prefight weighing-ins. Or more accurately, she spouts the nonsense with all the gravity of a lab-coated functionary in the NSDAP Racial Policy Office with calipers measuring the width of noses to peg a person into the official racial hierarchy. Completely absent is any sense of humility. You know, the lack of any self-awareness that she could be wrong.

One of the ramifications for believing in the unbelievable is the potential for human slaughter. People lose their individuality as they are subsumed into artificially differentiated groups. It’s easy to condemn thousands in a single stroke.

I came across the phenomena of genocidal females – to go along with their more numerous alternatively gendered soul-mates – while reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s second volume of his The Red Wheel. In exile in Switzerland with Lenin were Rosalia Zemlyachka and Yevgenia Bosch, both having key posts in the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror from 1917 to 1921.

Zemlyachka, a Marxist of longstanding, was instrumental with Bela Kun of bringing the Bolshevik butchery to the Crimea in 1920-21. Bosch similarly has blood all over her hands.

She became the head of the Ministry of the Interior in the Ukraine when the Bolshevik Red Army seized control of the country. Say “Ministry of the Interior” and you may as well be saying “secret police”, “more blood of the bourgeoisie”, and “Red Terror”. Her body count came to around 400,000-600,000 murdered Cossacks, Jews, and assorted “enemies of the people”.

How can normally decent people become mass killers? It’s highly unlikely without some animating belief system overwhelming all considerations, ideas like those of our would-be totalitarian interlocutor from the woke departments of Edge Hill University, Rachel Boyle. Reducing human beings to categories of goodness and badness as based on biological traits is dangerous business, very dangerous business.

RogerG

January 25, 2020January 25, 2020

Incompatible Worldviews

“You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You” – the Dean Martin duet with Shelby Lynne being the best – neatly encapsulates the great socio-political divide of our times. On one side is the progressive view of our nature. For progressives, our basic nature is forever malleable, either by us in our unrestrained will or molded by the rationalized efforts of an omnicompetent state. The result is view of the world as forever changing at our will, inside out and upside down.

We sell the notion to the young by telling them that “they can be anything that they want to be”. Really? No human being can be “anything that they want to be”, nor should they be.

Counterposed to the progressive idea is an older and unchangeable understanding, rooted in our faith and going back millennia. It’s the perception found in the pithy phrase, “the crooked timber of humanity”. We are fundamentally limited and flawed. It’s the basis for redemption and salvation in Christianity.

I’ve maintained for quite some time the belief that the schools in their curriculum and teacher training are essentially a progressive finishing academy. Encouraging the young to pursue their dreams is well and good, but not to the degree that reality is supplanted by a falsehood that leads to rule by an administrative state and transgenderism.

Read the lyrics (below) and especially the chorus “The world still is the same, You’ll never change it, As sure as the stars shine above”. It’s a great counterfactual.

You’re nobody ’till somebody loves you
You’re nobody ’till somebody cares

You may be king, you may possess the world
And it’s gold but gold won’t bring you
Happiness when you’re growing old

The world still is the same
You’ll never change it
As sure as the stars shine above

You’re nobody ’till somebody loves you
So find yourself somebody to love

The world still is the same
You’ll never change it
As sure as the stars shine above

Well, you’re nobody ’till somebody loves you
So find yourself somebody to love

(Songwriters: James Cavanaugh / Larry Stock / Russ Morgan)

Enjoy.

RogerG

January 21, 2020January 21, 2020

San Francisco and Another Vulgar Super Bowl

Adam Levine performs with Maroon 5 during the halftime show at Super Bowl LIII at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2019. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Lady Gaga in Super Bowl halftime show, 2017. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTHONY BEHAR / SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES)

Is it just me or have you noticed that the Super Bowl has become more than a championship game and has evolved into an over-hyped vulgarity having more in common with a bacchanalia like the reality of today’s Mardi Gras? In addition, one of this year’s entrants is the team from San Francisco, a place poisoned by its embrace of a counter-culture – one that is also the dominant mental software of the commanding heights of our national culture (Hollywood, academia, cosmopolitan America, etc.). So, we’ll have brought together in Hard Rock Stadium the orgy and the team representative of the city who embodies the fiercest assault on our traditions.

I’ve given this much thought: How could I allow my social views to influence my sports loyalties? I was a 49er fan since the onset of my memory. Slowly, in my later years, I began to notice the disconnect between my team loyalties and the city that has come to represent much that is seriously wrong in our society. Say “San Francisco” and you’ll bring to mind social and moral dysfunction, more so than any other place. I can’t get past this realization.

Vagina costumes in the Bay to Breakers road race, 2015.

It’s about the city that the team represents; it’s not about the team’s accomplishments or its players and organization. In my view, given the season’s worth of work, they should be the odds-on favorite. Congratulations to them for a job well done. Still, the city has become such an affront to decency that it is impossible to carry on as a fan.

Bottom line: Go Chiefs!

RogerG

January 14, 2020

No Political/Cultural Bubbles in America?

Compare the receptions received by Pres. Trump at a Washington Nationals World Series game in Washington, DC, on Oct. 28, 2019, and the college football national championship game in New Orleans between LSU and Clemson on Jan. 13, 2020, about 10 weeks later. Watch the 2 videos for the night-and-day reactions. He gets booed and is subjected to chants of “lock him up” in DC while he experienced sustained cheers and applause from a mostly Louisiana and South Carolina – hotbeds of Red America – crowd in New Orleans.

Washington, DC, Oct. 28, 2019

New Orleans, La., Jan. 13, 2020

Let’s dispense with the nonsense that there is no severe politico-cultural divide in America. It exists, and boy does it exist! I attribute the phenomena to a resurgence of a semi-violent, bombastic radical left alongside the rise of a provocateur on the right, Trump. Make no mistake about it, though, this unhinged left had been around since the 1960’s and has wormed its way into the corporate boardroom, faculty lounges, all avenues of our media, academia, and is resplendent in the training of our teachers and our kids’ curriculum. Few of our kids’ schools escape its tentacles. The cities and coasts are the nests for this myopic and revolutionary collectivism, and can be dubbed “blue” America.

Outside the blue bubbles of the cities and the coasts resides the vast stretches of Red America. Do our self-anointed cultural betters in their urban blue bubbles know how out-of-step they are in relation to the rest of the country? Red America certainly knows about them since the “blues” control the cultural commanding heights. If the “blues” know about their estrangement, I don’t think that they care.

RogerG

January 11, 2020January 12, 2020

Neil Peart, Libertarian of a Sort

Neil Peart of Rush, July 2010 (Paul Warner/WireImage)

Neil Peart posed at his drum kit in the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, Ohio on 17th December 1977. (Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns)

Neil Peart, master drummer for Rush, died of brain cancer earlier this week. May he rest in peace and God’s comfort for his family, friends, and devoted fans.

He was my age, born in 1952. He was 14 days my junior. In many ways, in his early lyrics, he reflected the fascinations of young and preternaturally rebellious teenage boys, alone and bookish and enthralled by individualism. To no surprise, to many teenage boys who were precociously literate in a facile sense, the writings of Ayn Rand would captivate them. Her libertarianism made an impression on them, and maybe myself to a degree during my coming-of-age years. After all, traditions and the standards that derive from traditions can seem like unnecessary and damaging social barnacles to a young and undeveloped mind.

It’s easy to drift into atheism or any of the iconoclastic faiths, finding the only one you knew the best, the one you grew up with, as flawed.

Then maturity sets in. Life’s experiences marinate your thoughts and a person might come to realize what G.K. Chesterton noticed a century before when he saw such minds “in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea” (from his book “Orthodoxy”). Traditions and traditional faith, and their moral and social norms, may have a sounder basis than a young and energetic mind can grasp. Peart came to understand this fact when he seemed to reject Randianism and even pure libertarianism when he said in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview:

“So as you go through past, your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into . . . a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.”

In many ways, Neil Peart represents a world and a time that I could easily recognize. It was a time of the breezy rejection of the old and the juvenile understanding that nothing exists beyond the self.

Such a mindset may make the individual a god, but at least it doesn’t wallow in the Sanders/Warren socialism, the collectivism of same, and the similarly self-identified cliques who are united by nothing more than the victimhood of their self-proclaimed oppression. If Randianism or libertarianism gets a young person to rebuff the nonsense, something good may come of it.

Below are the lyrics and live performance of their song “Anthem”, taken from an Ayn Rand novella, “Anthem”. You’ll need the lyrics to get the point.

Anthem

Know your place in life is where you want to be
Don’t let them tell you that you owe it all to me
Keep on looking forward, no use in looking ’round
Hold your head above the crowd and they won’t bring you down

Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind
A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind
We marvel after those who sought
The wonders in the world, wonders in the world
Wonders in the world they wrought

Live for yourself
There’s no one else more worth living for
Begging hands and bleeding hearts
Will only cry out for more

Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind
A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind
We marvel after those who sought
The wonders in the world, wonders in the world
Wonders in the world they wrought

Well, I know they’ve always told you
Selfishness was wrong
Yet it was for me, not you
I came to write this song

Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind
A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind
We marvel after those who sought
The wonders in the world, wonders in the world
Wonders in the world they wrought, wrought, wrought

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: N PEART / A LIFESON / G LEE

RogerG