Thanksgiving? Thank you, but no thank you

This year I have finally made up my mind to opt out of the unholy day decreed by the US government to be celebrated on the third Thursday of November. Thanks, but no thanks. I am not at all thankful for anything my government is doing, not for the destruction of American liberties, not for the slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and certainly not for the four more years of disaster we are going to endure thanks to the greed and stupidity of the American people.

In earlier years, my reservations about Thanksgiving had largely to do with historical questions. Yankee Puritans were not the first to have a formal day of thanks. That honour, depending on one's point of view, goes either to the Virginians who held some sort of celebration in 1619, two years before the Yankee 'holiday', or to Coronado's Spaniards who in 1541 celebrated mass in Texas and feasted on buffalo meat.

There is more to this than historical quibbling. Yankee Puritans reinvented the American experience in the 19th century, leaving little room for Southerners or Catholics in their grimly nationalist conception. As a Catholic and part-Southerner, I am mildly offended by the dominance of the Unitarian, Leftist, anti-Catholic bias of the myths invented by the Harvard and Yale faculties and shoved down our little throats in school, when we were children. I wish Squanto had left the lunatics to starve.    

The Puritans and Pilgrims came to America to impose their fanatical bigotry on anyone who got in their way - Indians, French and Spanish Catholics, and eventually Southerners. Cotton Mather, the great witch-hunter, explicitly argued that before the arrival of the Puritans the entire continent was under the control of devil-worshipping savages and Catholics. That is more or less the position taken by the Ivy League elite that owns and operates our government today. They hate everything I revere, and I return the compliment.

If the second English thanksgiving was staged by the bigoted ancestors of the Harvard faculty, the earlier thanksgiving in Virginia, by contrast, was celebrated by the sort of men who carved a nation out of the wilderness: land-seeking adventurers, not religious fanatics. 

The first great American was Captain John Smith, one of the leaders of the Jamestown settlement. While the proprietors, out of greed, had tried to impose a form of communism on the settlers, Smith, seeing the indolence and starvation that resulted from the silly experiment, informed the first Virginians that only those who worked would eat. He turned the colony around in short order. I only wish we could have an American President cut from Smith's cloth!

Today, I have two other reasons for rejecting the Thanksgiving 'holiday'. The first is obvious: It is not a holiday but only a government-decreed vacation day. Thanks, but no thanks. The country has enough slackers already, eating at my expense and talking on their Obama phones. Eating and watching football on television is not a holiday but an exercise in self-stultification.

I am sick of all government holidays. We used to celebrate Christopher Columbus on his presumed birthday but, like other government 'holidays', it has been moved to the nearest Monday to provide a long weekend. We used to honor the birthdays of George Washington, our liberator and founding President, and Abraham Lincoln, who led a bloody revolution that transformed our republic. Now we have a generic Presidents' Day to honour Washington, Lincoln and Millard Fillmore. The one man we do honour with a special day is Martin Luther King, about whose doctorate, politics and personal life no one may speak of or even know the truth, since his FBI files are sealed and with good reason. Even to raise this issue in the American press is an invitation to censorship. Thank goodness that Britons, at least, never shall be slaves.

I have come to the point of rejecting all the bogus holidays invented by the U.S. government. There is a real holiday today, and it is in honor of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. In the crypt of her church in Rome, there is a beautiful statue of the sleeping Caecilia whose uncorrupt remains were discovered when they opened her tomb. I intend to spend this day working - if writing this piece can be honestly described as working - reading Dryden's great ode to Saint Caecilia, and listening to music composed before I was born.  

Oh, yes, and we are having a turkey dinner. I like roast turkey, and this is about the only religious obligation we Americans continue to acknowledge.

Back to the Drawing Board

Mitt Romney had no sooner conceded the election to President Obama than leftists of both parties sent up the predictable sighs:  The Republican Party had forfeited the election by alienating the Latino vote.  It is time for the Grand Old Party to change course on immigration and join the President in his campaign to give amnesty to illegal aliens and increase the flow of Mexicans into the United States.  The Marxist chorus in the Democratic Party was joined by a Republican glee club led by House Speaker John Boehner, GOP bigwig Haley Barbour, and radio mouthpiece Sean Hannity.

The only thing surprising about these opinions is that anyone felt it necessary to proclaim the obvious--and with such fanfare.  It is as if Messers Boehner and Barbour, preceded by ten pipers piping and eleven lords aleaping, declared the sun was rising in the East and would, by the end of the day, set in the West.

 How, my naive friends, can Republicans--self-proclaimed conservatives as they are--do an about-face on a fundamental plank in the conservative platform?  When have conservatives, British or American, done anything else?

Of course, the change of position is purely rhetorical.  GOP leaders have always favored open borders and opposed crackdowns even on illegal immigrants.  They cannot say so, usually, but they have worked hand-in-glove with their mirror-images on the farther left to bring about the demographic revolution that has made conservative ideology about as relevant to the American political scene as a debate over the insertion of filioque into the Nicene Creed.  Naturally, there are philosophers, antiquarians, and honest men who want to know the truth about the Creed or the American future, but their convictions would gain no traction in the slime-pit of American politics.

Republican leaders have been gulling conservative voters for decades, and not just on immigration.  Every four years they proclaim the sacredness of life, only to abandon any effort to restrict abortion, once they are in office.  Conservatives, who are for the most part naive, uneducated, and irrational, are only to eager to believe whatever lies they are told by the Bushes, Gingriches, and Boehners. That is the part they have been assigned to play in America's political theater.   As Eli Wallach asked, famously, in The Magnificent Seven, "If God did not want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep."  

For an analogy try to imagine soldiers in the French Foreign Legion.  Risking their lives every day, living in squalor, getting beaten regularly by the officers, they swear they will not reenlist. Then when the day comes, their commander tells them they will soon be getting a swimming pool and a bordello staffed with real Playboy bunnies.  Reassured, they sign on for another four years, and another and another and another.

When Texas Senator John Cornyn posed as a leading advocate of immigration restriction, their hearts went out to the great statesman from the Lone Star state.  Cornyn's solution was to crack down on the flood of illegals but revive something like the Braceros program that brought in Mexican farm workers on temporary work visas.  When Senator Cornyn spoke at a little conference I had arranged in Washington, we asked him if his program would include members of both sexes.  Of course it would.  My books editor, Chilton Williamson (author of The Immigration Mystique) asked the obvious question:  How did he propose to prevent these women from conceiving and bearing children who would automatically be citizens of the United States, and whose ambiguous status would give fast-track privileges to permanent residency and citizenship to the parents?  Sitting next to him, I could see the senator's two or three stands of hair--teased and poofed into a natural toupee--twitching in irritation.

I do not at all blame Cornyn.  The business interests that put him and keep him in office demand cheap labor.  Mexican immigrants, especially the illegals, keep wages down.  Naturally the net effect of our policy is to exploit the poor Mexicans in order to subjugate black and white American workers.   

This Republican duplicity has been going on for decades.  Not long after Ronald Reagan was elected, I went to Washington to see my friend Samuel Francis, who was then working for North Carolina Senator John East, a close ally of Jesse Helms.  We had drinks with Sam's colleague Palmer Stacy and talked for over an hour of the threat of mass immigration.  When the conversation changed, I remember, Stacy stood up and said, "If y'all are not going to talk about immigration, I'm leaving."  When I pointed out that immigration was only one of many important crises facing our country, he replied that mass immigration was the one issue that would, if not quickly checked, destroy America. 

He was right, of course, but when I started raising the issue in print, the response from the Republicans was the usual slander:  Only a bigot would stand in the way of a new and better life for Mexicans.  Any chance of winning this fight was lost in the Bush years, and I told the anti-immigrationists as much.  Their response was to blame the messenger, much as they had been blaming the desperately poor Mexicans who came here seeking work and welfare.  

The real blame lies with the greed of American businessmen who, when they are not shipping jobs to China, are importing illegal immigrants.  Go to Mexico and you will see the buses lined up advertising destinations like Chicago or Des Moines.  The GOP, from its foundation, has been the party of greed.  From the beginning it represented the Northeastern banks, corrupt railroad interests, and industrialists seeking to impose high tariffs on manufactured goods.  Apart from a handful of idealists--not including Lincoln--slavery was only an issue because it could be used to justify the repression and subjugation of the South's agrarian interests.  Today, their political heirs, promote free trade, economic globalism, and mass immigration for similar reasons.

Republican strategists, of course, have an excuse ready for their destructive policies.  Although the real issue was always, as it is now, cheap labor, the GOP's geniuses claimed they were going to attract the Mexicans to the Party and use them as a counter-weight to the black vote that the Democrats could count on.  Naturally, they were rarely so candid in public, but you could hear echoes in the rantings of the talk radio jocks. 

 Well, then, here we are.  In an unprecedentedly high turn-out, 70% of Latinos supported Obama.  The Grand Old Party's only chance for survival is to ape Disraeli by dishing the Democrats.  Using the old Republican wheeze of "equal opportunity," they can be expected to come up with massive programs to transfer wealth from their traditional base of support--middle class Euro-Americans--to Latinos of all types, including wealthy Cubans and people who accidentally bear an Hispanic surname.  I can already hear them debating the claims of Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio to be the next standard-bearer.  I suppose it is too soon to annoint George P. Bush, the Mexican-American son of Jeb and nephew of George W.?

Will the conservatives fall for this?  Of course they will:  They also do.  English conservatives followed Disraeli over the cliff and counted themselves lucky to have so brilliant a leader.  American conservatives followed such dubious leaders as Nixon, Goldwater, and George W. Bush.  It will enough for Sean and Rush to  give them their marching orders, just as they always have done.  I don't wish to sound bitter, because in fact I am quite cheerful about all this, but American conservatives deserve everything they are going to get.

 

Hard Times in the USA

 This has been a very bad day so far.  

It was bad even before I finally decided to get up.  Last night I went to bed early, fatigued and jet-lagged from two days of travel from Bury St. Edmunds, from which I foolishly travelled by train to Manchester Airport, where I spent the night at the usual cheerless godless overpriced airport hotel before catching my flight to Chicago.  

Then, at 6:30 AM, to my complete disgust, I realized that in our absence our 34 year old son had drunk up all the coffee in the house.   I drove to our nearest grocery store only to discover that it did not open up until 7.  I drove to the next nearest to find that most of the coffee was either pre-ground or flavored with chemicals.  Grabbing the best they had, I went to the check-out to discover that the only lane open was one of those automated systems where you push the cash in and hope for the best.  I don't do business with machines and said so to a nearby clerk.  "Number Seven's open," she countered.  But, I pointed out, the clerk at number seven had not bothered to turn her light on.  "I can do it here, " she replied, only to begin walking me through the automated procedures.  

 I told her "no thanks" and walked out to the sound of her protesting, "But number seven's open."  Normally, these little contre-temps would bother be not at all, but I had just spent two weeks going from York to Lincolnshire to Norfolk and Suffolk without running into a single clerk or waiter who was not both courteous and kind.  It takes so little to become spoiled.

By now it was 7:05, and I returned to the first store, which had exactly the same range of bad coffees.  Picking the same brand, I approached the check-out with some trepidation.  The clerk at the register, at my approach, abandoned her station, while the other clerk was busy doing paper work.  Welcome back, I thought to myself, as I waited patiently and obediently for someone to take my money.

It was a lousy way to begin the day.  Oh yeah, then I turned on the radio and found out that Obama had been reelected and that the Democrats had held the Senate.  In practical everyday terms, rude clerks bad coffee, and thoughtless offspring count for more than political turn-overs.  Whichever mob gets in power does not change the fact that a mob is in power.  In this case, however,  people like me can now look to four more years of deficit spending, foreign policy disasters, and cheap rhetoric, and we can anticipate a lifetime--blissfully short in my case--as part of the subjugated underclass of workers and professionals who do not live off the taxpayers.  

Serving the government, whether by collecting welfare or teaching dispute resolution, that's the life.  If only I had made a career in the academy--a veritable Shangri La.  How ddid the song go?  "A Land of bluebirds and fountains and nothing to do."  Skip the bluebirds and fountains but a middle class income without work or responsibility--it sounds like paradise to this overworked editor.

In the end, I did not bring myself to vote for Mitt Romney, the party's, if not the people's choice.  To all those who voted for Obama, my final word is:  It's your country, and I hope you enjoy the ride as the good old USA plunges down the roller coaster of imperial welfarism into failure and poverty.  To the Republicans, all I can say is that you have brought this on yourselves.  Your actions and inactions have produced a country that cannot even accept a lukewarm moderate like Romney.  Your only choice will be to pull a Disraeli--dish the Democrats by running  to the left of them.  More in the days to come...

Bishops Defend Freedom From Religion

As the presidential campaign came to a close, religious questions sneaked surreptitiously into the national debate.  The Democrats had an easy target: Governor Romney's unusual religious affiliation, though since few Democrats know anything about any religion, particularly Christianity, they found it difficult to distinguish Mormonism from other not quite so strange semi-Christian sects.  Watching national commentators fumbling for words, I was reminded of the media reaction to Jimmie Carter's declaration that he was a born-again Christian.  The national dailies and weeklies actually had to run major stories explaining what the phrase meant.

Some Evangelicals responded by changing their position on the LDS.  The people who run Billy Graham's website Mormonism went so far as to remove Mormonism from a list of cults.  Since the best defense is a good offense, the Republican Christianists went on the attack, excoriating President Obama and his Party for subtly shifting their advocacy of religious freedom to a defense of "freedom of worship," a phrase that has been kicking around the dusty corridors of professional religiosity for some time. 

Freedom of religion, as we have all heard in sermons and editorials, goes beyond the right to assemble and worship in the proverbial "church of your choice." Religious freedom is the right to live out the life prescribed by religion: to wear religious garb and symbols, preaching the faith in public, doing all such good works that the faithful have been instructed to perform.  

Alarmists can point to the shifting rhetoric of rights as enunciated by the UN Secretary General.  

In connection with Freedom of Worship, there is also the ambiguity of the UN Secretary General recent remarks on the freedom of expression which is absolute--so long as you offend no one (except Christians).

"All human beings have the inalienable right to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly. These are very fundamental rights. But, at the same time, this freedom of expression should not be abused by individuals. Freedom of expression should be and must be guaranteed and protected, when they are used for common justice, common purpose. When some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected in such a way. So, my position is that freedom of expression, while it is a fundamental right and privilege, should not be abused by such people, by such a disgraceful and shameful act."

So it is the rulers of states and (in the Secretary General's imagination) the world, who get to decide what we are free to say and how we are free to worship.

The Deseret News—owned and controlled by the LDS organization—weighed in:  "But worshiping within a sanctuary constitutes just one facet of a living faith. Religious institutions and believers realize their vocations most fully when engaged in ministering to the sick, caring for the poor, counseling the poor in spirit, educating the rising generation and promoting integrity in society."

This all sounds rather nice, but (as I explained in a recent column) when Christianists try to turn it into an ultimate creed, they run afoul of religions that persecute other religions or engage in disagreeable acts.  Christianists then fall back on the position that freedom of religion is to be permitted except where exercise of that freedom conflicts with longstanding moral and legal traditions, such as prohibitions on murder, or even with more recent revelations on the rights of women, children, and brute beasts. 

As an aside, let me point out the obvious flaw:  None of the great monotheisms, compared with Greco-Roman or Egyptian paganism, has much of a track record on tolerance and religious freedom.  The Romans cracked down on the Druids, both for human sacrifice and for their agitation against imperial government, and they sporadically persecuted Christians, mostly for their alleged misanthropy and lack of patriotism.  Greeks and Romans did not care what you believed, so long as you paid lip service to the religion of the city or of the empire.

Religious freedom may well be the prudent thing for Christians of this age, but it was non-Christian liberals like Mr. Jefferson who promoted the idea of toleration of dissent.  "Error of opinion," he intoned in his inaugural address, "may be tolerated where freedom is left to combat it."  Note, by the way, that Jefferson used the word may as opposed to must. He was not so foolish as to declare an absolute freedom of opinion and expression.

President Jefferson was, of course, speaking of political opinions, but he would have cheerfully applied the same rule to religion, if only because largely indifferent to all religions.  His family, friends, and neighbors were all--to one extent or another—Christians, mostly Anglicans, and he had no quarrel with a superstition (as he certainly regarded Trinitarian Christianity) that taught kindness, charity, thrift, and personal responsibility.  

When liberal deists, agnostics, and atheists declare themselves in favor of religious freedom, there is no paradox or anomaly, because toleration of diversity is a liberal but not a Christian virtue.  As a postmodern man living in a postChristian world, I freely acknowledge the practical advantages of religious freedom, but as a Christian I am not naïve enough to believe that this doctrine was taught by Christ and his Apostles or by the great doctors of the Church.  Nor do we find it in the great reformers—Calvin was as an enthusiastic a persecutor as Torquemada. 

Freedom of religion, then, is the creed of the anti-Christian liberal tradition that has always wanted to stick Christianity in a box that can be put safely away in some Lost Articles depot.  When they are more honest, anti-Christians speak openly of "freedom from religion," which is the real meaning of the campaign for religious tolerance.  (More to come.) 

 

Christian Politics in PostChristian America

American Christians like to think of their country as peculiarly religious.  Some, invoking the old Puritan metaphor of the city on the hill, insist that the United States is no mere nation-state, but an exception in the history of nations. Our nation is a beacon shining the light of moral virtue and political liberty on a world darkened by atheism and immorality.  

Many of these latter-day Puritans are good people and fine Christians, but they do display a disquieting tendency to turn Christian faith into a religious and political ideology that is not so much Christianity as Christianism.  Christianists are not content merely to lead Christian lives, go to church, and practice charity.  They must be forever making the world a better place.  In the process, they are not always careful to distinguish the morality and theology of historic Christianity from the typically American cult of free enterprise and democratic capitalism.  For them, Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan, while they may not rank with Jesus and the Apostles, are at least on par with popes, patriarchs, and the pastors of megachurches.

Some Christianists must be disturbed by the recent poll numbers released by the Pew Research Center, showing a dramatic rise in religious indifference in the United States. One fifth of Americans now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, and the numbers rise to one third among people under 30. This poll, which includes the six per cent of Americans who claim to be atheist or agnostic, is an indication of a significant increase in religious indifference in just five years.   

Numbers, of course, do not tell the entire story, since in recent decades it is the mainstream churches that are haemorrhaging members, while more passionate or traditional forms of Christianity are growing. Methodists and Episcopalians are down, but Pentecostalists and Latin-Mass Catholics are up.

For Christianists, the spectacle of America going the way of all flesh must be depressing, but for more traditional Christians - Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, and serious Calvinist - it is merely a reminder that Christ's kingdom is not of this world. This reminder is particularly timely, given the Republicans' tendency to turn opportunistic wars into crusades and elections into ideological struggles between the angels of light and the angels of darkness.

The current standard-bearer of Republican Party Christianism, ironically, belongs to a religion that many traditional Christians do not recognize as Christian.  In the past few days, Governor Romney has been accused of flip-flopping and even of tergiversation on the abortion question. There is some basis for the accusation. Romney's positions on abortion, if they have not quite been all over the map, have at least occupied a good deal of territory.

He has gone from the fairly moderate stance he took running for governor to a fairly hard-core pro-life position, from which he has recently shown signs of backing off.

While, not too long ago, Romney had vowed to defund Planned Parenthood, he now says, in an interview with the Des Moines Register, 'There's no legislation with regards to abortion that I'm familiar with that would become part of my agenda'.  In 1994, Senator Ted Kennedy described his then opponent's position as 'multiple-choice'.

Does Romney's position on abortion really matter?  I could answer yes, no, or maybe, depending on what aspect of the question we are looking at.  As a Christian, I have little use for politicians who advocate infanticide.  However, as a voter who hopes for a little fiscal sanity and knows that neither party will ever undo Roe v. Wade, I could hardly care less.  Worrying about a politician's position on life questions is like worrying about what they will do to improve the air quality on Mars.  

The life question is not just a distraction:  It is a smokescreen.  Every four years, Republican candidates pander to pro-life American Christians, but they never manage to find the time to do anything about limiting, much less banning abortion.  George Bush pretended to do things to restrict the use of foetal stem cells, but on the practical level he did nothing.

The one reason to care about Romney's never-ending change of position is that it raises questions about his character.  Does he actually believe anything?  Of course he doesn't, not, at least, to the point that his beliefs would affect his actions.  He is, after all, a politician.  I cannot think of a worse name to call a man.

But the Christianists have already forgiven the governor.  Paul Ryan claims he has been misunderstood.  Rick Perry and other self-described Christian conservatives deflect the problem by pointing to the Supreme Court.  Vote for Romney and he'll put another sound Christian conservative on the Court.  Someone like John Roberts, perhaps.  Ralph Reed, the official voice of GOP Christianists dismisses what some regard as a matter of life and death as 'just an issue of semantics'.

My advice to Christian voters is to set religious questions aside weigh the issues and their interests.  Neither candidate can make much of a claim to being a Christian, and anyone serious about his faith would not be in national politics.  However you decide vote, be sure to pay no attention to the professional cynics of the so-called religious so-called right who reduce every serious question to 'an issue of semantics'.

Romney's Last Chance - Democratic Apathy

If we can believe most pollsters, President Obama has the election sewn up and in the bag. He is leading in most of the crucial swing states, and, insiders are saying, Governor Romney's only chance is a knock-out blow in one of the debates. Given Romney's rhetorical clumsiness, this is unlikely. Obama is not much of a debater, true, and he cannot speak impromptu without tripping over his jumbled syntax, but he is Cicero and Burke, compared with the uninspiring Romney, whose wooden grin and rah-rah manner are what you get when you cross a college boy with a stage villain.

The pollsters' predictions are based, to a certain extent, on certain demographic assumptions that are widely quoted in such infallible sources as National Public Radio.  If black voters, 95% of whom voted for Obama last time around, repeat their record turn-out and Mexican voters support Obama to the extent they did in 2008, the President only needs 38% of the white vote to win.  Scott Rasmussen, among the most reliable pollsters, has drawn the obvious conclusion:  He observed recently that the Romney campaign is the last stand for the GOP establishment.  

The Republicans are on the horns of a dilemma that they have helped to create.  To solidify their base, they have to call for restrictions on immigration--restrictions they have no intention of enacting or enforcing--but their tough rhetoric has alienated the one group on whom their future depends:  Mexican-American voters.  

Conservatives (I was one of them) were warning them of this danger as long ago as the 1980's, but the Republicans' response is that agribusiness and other industries depend on the cheap labor of underpaid illegal immigrants.  As the novelist Edward Abbey pointed out at the time, the Republicans want their cheap labor, while the Liberals have their cheap cause.  Between them, they pried the doors off our southern border and flung them into the Rio Grande.  Whether they win or lose this presidential race, the Republicans will have to run openly, next time around, on a program of open borders, amnesty for illegals, and stepped up Affirmative Action privileges for Latinos.  If the strategy does not work, they have only themselves to blame.

But, are the polls correct?  Is the race Obama's to lose?  Possibly, probably.  I have one nagging doubt.  As they used to say in the Westerns, it's too quiet out there.  Four years ago, at this point, there were yard signs all over my neighborhood.  This time, there is hardly anything.  The people I meet in business or at church are all promising to vote for Romney, but it is not because they like the governor.  In fact, they do not.  They do, however, fear that an Obama victory will finish off the American economy, wipe out their pensions, and eliminate Social Security.  That is enough for them, and it may be enough for me.

There is, I think, another reason for the lack of public support for Romney:  fear.  People are afraid of reprisals.  It is not so much that they fear attacks from the New Black Panthers or other militant groups, but in displaying a Romney sign they may think they are inviting accusations of bigotry.  I have, in fact, heard such talk.

But, then, why are there so few Obama signs?  My black neighbors, in 2008, covered their yards with signs and banners.  This year, nothing.  Some black Americans tell reporters that they are disappointed in the President's failure to deliver on his promises; others seem so confident of victory that they are not doing anything for the campaign.

The Obama campaign and its allies are clearly worried about the apathy. The Jewish Committee on Education and Research (a well-heeled PAC) has prepared a tasteless and poorly written commercial, starring former Hollywood star Samuel L. Jackson.  The refrain of the commercial, "Wake the F-word up!" is shouted by Jackson (a former militant) at the members of a liberal white family that have become apathetic.  In the end, the phrase is shouted by the heroine of the commercial, a girl roughly ten years old.  There was a time, not so long ago, when the makers of such a commercial and the parents of the child would face some consequences for putting profanity into the mouth of a little girl.  We have made such progress in recent years that no one seems to be disturbed.

Apathy is Romney's only hope.  The Republicans will probably turn out their base.  I haven't voted Republican in a  Presidential election since 1980, but I am strongly considering it now.  My only motives are greed and fear.  I can see my dreams of retiring to Italy going up in smoke (though certainly not factory smoke), if this inept administration is reelected.  This is a wide-spread feeling in the American middle class.  If Romney does better than expected with Mexican Americans and if the black voters persist in their apathy, we may be spared the dreaded four more years. 

In the long run--and in America, long runs are shorter than the election cycle--it does not matter who wins.  Within a few years, tax-consumers will so outnumber tax-payers that there will be no point in working or saving.  I have seen the future--in places like Mexico--and it doesn't work.

 

 

The castration of the modern man

At last, researchers have solved the problem that haunts the modern world.  The problem is death or, put another way, longevity:  how to live--or rather exist and consume--as long as possible.  Vitamins, monkey-glands, human growth hormone--they've all been tried but with limited success.  Now, finally a breakthrough.

According to a story in the Times of India. South Korean scholars at Inha University, in a "careful study of genealogy records of noble members of the imperial court of the Korean Chosun dynasty  (AD 1392-1910)," have discovered that male hormones account for the difference in longevity between males and females.  The evidence comes from the longer lives of Korean noblemen who underwent castration in order to secure positions at the court.  

I was curious to see how male readers would respond to the story.  One or two emitted the predicatable, "ouch," while at least two concluded that the research illustrated the danger of unprotected sexual relations with women.

The answer, then to a longer if not more exciting life is a choice among several options: condoms, homosexuality, and castration, anything but that worn-out combination of love and marriage with the attendant children.

Since the days when the late Margaret Sanger went out preaching about inconsequential sex and the eugenic limitaiton of the world's nonwhite populations, liberated males and females have dreamed of a world without fear, disease, overpopulalation, and babies.  C.S. Lewis diagnosed the future they were planning as The Abolition of Man.  I do not say it is a bad thing or a good thing only that is a thing, a moral and political reality that dwarfs such petty problems as the fall-out from Arab Spring or the truth or fiction of Global Warming.  

The earth may or not be getting warmer because of what humans may or may not have done, the US and its satellites may or may not have entered into a period of increasing conflict with the Islamic world, but this much is certain:  Virility has become something like the mark of Cain.  

The modern metrosexual male is already morally neutered, however athletic his erotic performances may be, but his castration may before too long turn from metaphor to reality. This will be what we Americans call a two-fer, a final solution to two obstacles to happiness, mortality and manhood.

Reaping the Whirlwind: America must understand that Muslims are human too

Anti-American protests have continued to spread across the globe, though the fires of passion are predictably burning out.  People do have jobs to go to, children to feed, lives to lead. Even violence-prone jihadists can't always be breaching embassies or murdering diplomats.

The official American line on all this is to blame the makers of a childish film called The Innocence of Muslims.  Anyone who has seen this little masterpiece can understand why Muslims might get angry with the US government for tolerating such a travesty of film-making, but it is impossible, seriously, to believe that these violent protests around the world are a spontaneous response to a movie that few have seen.  

Such naïveté would seem to be predicated on a contempt for Muslims that in any other context would be condemned as racism, but that is the position taken by Secretary of State Clinton.  Every time she comments on the protests, Clinton lays all the blame on the movie.  Calling the video "disgusting and reprehensible," Mme. Clinton went on to observe: "It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage."

If I were a Muslim, Clinton's remarks would provoke far more rage in me than the film.  Libyan President Mohammed el-Megarif described the notion as "preposterous," and he and other Libyan officials insist that the attack was a planned assault by foreigners, possibly connected to Al Qaeda.

Naturally, our Libyan ally, whom the US and its allies put into power, would wish to minimize the involvement of Libyans in the murder of the US ambassador.  Nonetheless, his opinion is confirmed by reporters who have interviewed protestors.  Many of them have not seen or even heard of the movie, and they say they are motivated primarily by hatred of the US and Israel.

What else did President Obama and his Secretary of State expect?  When Arab Spring erupted, wiser heads than the administration apparently has in its employ predicted the outcome:  the overthrow of pragmatic dictators who had learned to be grateful the US--or at least to fear it--and a triumph for Islamist forces.  If we can believe Hilary Clinton, she expected an upsurge of democracy and women's rights.  What she faces now is a dramatic rise in Islamic anti-Americanism. Of course, Clinton cannot admit the truth, because it would be an admission that her own foreign policy has been a disaster for US security.

When will the Clintons and Albrights, the Condaleeza Rices and Dick Cheneys grow up and realize they live in a dangerous world they cannot control?  When will they quit sending people like Ambassador Chris Stevens to meddle in revolution, as he did?  When Stevens arrived in Libya in April 2011, the Washington Post headline was explicit: US envoy Chris Stevens arrives in Libya to help opposition fighters.  The story quotes a State Department spokesman who said that  Stevens'  mission was to "explore ways to open the funding spigots for an opposition movement that is desperately short of cash and supplies. 

Senator John McCain was equally enthusiastic when he visited Libyaduring the revolution: "I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not Al-Qaeda. To the contrary: They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation."  Apparently neither Senator McCain nor the man who defeated him in the presidential race failed to understand theh character of some of the Libyan rebels.  To this day, the provisional government has not taken steps to  punish the man who filmed himself sexually assaulting the unarmed Libyan dictator before murdering him.  (I am still waiting for an official American condemnation of this savagery.) 

The Obama administration, following McCain's lead, is trying to deny or minimize foreign elements in the Benghazi attack that cost Chris Stevens his life.  Benghazi has symbolic importance: it is the place where  the Libyan Revolution began.  But as early as last November, the Al Quaeda flag was raised, along with the flag of the Libyan rebels, over a Benghazi courthouse.

There are insane Muslims, as there are insane Christians and insane Jews, but the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have temporarily abandoned their daily lives to show their hatred of the United States are neither insane nor disgruntled film critics.  They may not all watch CNN or read a newspaper, but they know that the US government has been regularly killing Muslim civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  Many American's believe it's different when we do it, of course, because we believe in democracy, human rights, and the liberation of women, but in the eyes of these poor benighted Muslims, a dead child is a dead child.

This is not to make light of Islamic traditions that justify violence and terrorism.  Much of what The Innocence of Muslims depicted, in its clownish and degrading way, has history on its side.  The Christian (and now post-Christian) West has been at war, on and off, with Islam for over a millennium, and so long as there are believing Muslims, the struggle will continue.  That is why the Americans pin their hopes on the degrading effects of the consumerism that has destroyed our own civilization.  They refuse to understand that Muslims like September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta can spend the night eating junk food and watching pornography and then go out the next day and kill hundreds of people.  They cannot understand the religious motivation of Muslim men and women, because they have no religion of their own.  

Whatever we decide to do about the Kulturkampf in Europe and the United States, it is none of our business to disturb the peace of Islamic countries, by light-heartedly setting out to change regimes or by going to war over imaginary weapons of mass destruction.  We never had any justification for attacking Iraq and no hope of ever effectively controlling Afghanistan.  If a war is unwinnable -- as our two current wars have been from the day we killed the first Iraqi and the first Afghan -- it should not be started.  Leave these poor people in peace.

Here in America, we are coming to the end of the presidential election season.  The two parties differ on many points, some of them important, but both are committed to the same foreign policy which can best be described as Global Democratic Jihad.  We refuse to control our own border, but we think we can, as President John Quincy Adams complained, go about the world looking for dragons to slay.  

We have done our best to sow the wind, and now, whether we like it or not, we are reaping the whirlwind. 
 

God and the Democrats

Christian conservatives in Florida are all het up over remarks made by Mark Alan Siegel, the Palm Beach County chairman of the Democratic Party.  Siegel, it appears, was not happy with his party's decision to reinsert the word "God" into the platform.  Evangelical Republicans had spent a good 24 hours damning the godless Democrats for eliminating both an entirely bland and pointless reference to the Creator and a statement that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.  

My own Senator, Dick Durbin, when he tried to explain away his party's gaffe, only dug the hole deeper. The Democratic leadership, understanding the price they were going to have to pay for their party's militant atheists, orchestrated the reinsertion of God and Jerusalem--though the rank-and-file did  their party little good when they booed the proposal.  They actually booed God!  

Some Democrats apparently do not yet understand that hypocrisy, not Christianity, is the American religion.  We are happy to elect godless sinners who only go to Church for weddings and funerals, so long as they make the usual noises, as the deist Lincoln did, about "the author of our being," etc.  If Cardinal Dolan understood the reality of American religion, he might not have wasted breath at either convention and spared us a Christian prayer in which Christ and Abraham are put, rhetorically at least, on the same level.   

Mr. Siegel is more candid.  Caught off guard he responded to a reporter's question, by saying the obvious, “I’m Jewish, I’m not a fan of any other religion than Judaism.”  Pressed about Christian support for Israel, he went on to declare: “The worst possible allies for the Jewish state are the fundamentalist Christians who want Jews to die and convert so they can bring on the second coming of their Lord,” and added, for good measure, the observation that Christian Zionists in the US had exerted an unwholesome pressure on the Israelis to pursue hardline policies that are antithetical to the security and existence of the Jewish state. 

When the perky reporter suggested that Siegel was anti-Christian, he calmly replied that he did not believe that Fundamentalist Christians were true friends of Israel.  This is a classic case of a political gaffe, so clearly defined decades ago by Michael Kinsley of The New Republic.  Whenever a politician inadvertently says what he thinks or lets the truth slip out, it is called a gaffe.

The response of the Christian Right was entirely predictable:  ANTI-CHRISTIAN HATE SPEECH SPEWS FROM THE PALM BEACH DEM CHAIR, screamed the headline of the website Blaze, whose editors are apparently unaware that "spew" is a transitive verb meaning something like eject. 

Siegel has inevitably taken a leave of absence and apologised, but for what?  For saying that as a Jew he cares about his own religion?  I take my hat off to a man who prefers his own religion to any other and has the guts to admit it.  He did not say he hated other religions, only that he cared only for his own.  Bravo!

He obviously did not intend to attack Christians per se, only the Fundamentalists who, he claimed, only support Israel to bring on the end times, when all Jews will either convert to Christianity or die as prelude to the reign of Christ on earth.  Obviously, Siegel was painting with a broad political brush.  Not all Fundamentalists believe in the pre-millennialist theory of the end times, and not all pre-millennnialists are Fundamentalists. On the whole, however, his characterization is as accurate as his assessment of the impact of Christian Zionists on Israeli policy.  Many Israelis agree with his assessment, and I am not sure they are wrong,

This episode brought to mind a dinner party in Tel Aviv I attended not too many years ago. The hosts were the Serbian ambassador and her husband, a distinguished Serbian writer. Among the guests were several veteran Israeli journalists, a distinguished American Jewish policy analyst and editor, and a leader of a major American Jewish Zionist organization. The trouble started when I described a trip I had made to a Jewish settlement in occupied territory.  

"Occupied territory?" shouted the Zionist leader, "You mean Samaria-Galilee." This was not my fight, and I said I was happy to call the region whatever was most acceptable, but the journalists broke in to tell the American that they did not appreciate his long-distance militancy.  All he wanted to do, they argued, was to create trouble in Israel, while keeping his family safely in California.  They had both served in the IDF, and so did their sons. They were not at all amused by the posturing of American Zionists, whether Jewish or Christian.

Poor Mark Alan Siegel, in disgrace for loving his own religion and caring so much about his other homeland, Israel, that he did not much like the people who were leading it down the path to destruction.  Many Israelis feel the same way, a majority if we can believe some of the more doveish policy experts I have spoken with.  

The debate between ultra-Zionist hawks and pragmatic doves is carried out every day in Israel, where there is far more freedom of speech on this subject than exists in the United States.  Whether the Israeli left (a term that only has relevance for the Palestinian question) is correct, it is not up to me to say.  I simply do not know.  

What I do know is that the flames of hatred in the Middle East are kept hot by the religious tales told by Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

The Democrats were right in the first place when they took God out of their godless party's platform, but an even better idea is to take God out of the politics of Israel.

Down With Democracy!

The Republican convention has opened, more or less, in Tampa.  In my house, this is one more reason to be happy we never switched over to digital television.  We'll have to miss perky Ann Romney's unbiased tribute to her husband, feisty Nikki Haley's affirmation of her Tea Party principles, and the endless close-ups of the dazed, the retarded, and the corrupt who fill the ranks of the delegates and activists of all political parties.  

If I am lucky not to have access to television, my fellow-Americans are even luckier in not having any knowledge of American history.  Conservatives are fond of complaining about the failure of American public education, but they are entirely mistaken.  Trillions of dollars have been spent on this magnificent campaign to produce a population that is as ignorant as it is servile.  TV only finishes the job.

If Americans knew just a little of their history, they would be overwhelmed by melancholy, reflecting on the precipitous decline in the quality of American presidents, from the age of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson to the age of Van Buren, Buchanan and U.S. Grant to the age of Clinton, Bush, and Obama.  It has been a long way down, a steady decline only rarely interrupted by the occasional man of principle or character--Franklin Pierce, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge.

One crucial phase in this decline was the institution of the party caucus system created largely by Martin Van Buren, the "used up man" so derided by the campaign of William Henry Harrison, the first truly empty suit president elected on the strength of PR.  If Van Buren was "Old Kinderhook" (the name of his estate that probably gave rise to the universal Americanism, "OK"), Harrison, the old fraud, was "Tippecanoe," the famous victory at which the outnumbered Indians, after being attacked, ran out of ammunition.

Van Buren's party system, borrowed from Britain, subjected--or tried to--statesmen of Calhoun's stature to the petty discipline of party hacks like Van Buren.  This discipline gave us the series of corrupt nonentities that typify American politics:  Rutherford B. Hayes, Warren Harding, Harry S. Truman....I dare not mention any living political figures.

Candidates for major offices were selected at brokered conventions by party leaders meeting in smoke-filled rooms.  At least the party leaders had some notion of competence and presentability, but all that went by the board in the naive 1960's, when the parties pretended to reform themselves by turning over the selection to a series of popularity contests--primaries and caucuses--held in the states.  The result was a dramatic decline in human material:  We got presidential candidates like Jimmie Carter, Fritz Mondale, and Al (this one astonished even me) Gore, Bob (the party owes me this) Dole, George (what me worry?) Bush, and--the living nadir of the  GOP--John McCain.

If this is democracy, I am ready to try an alternative.  Whenever anyone dares to criticize democracy, he is inevitably slapped down with Churchill's witticism that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.  What neither Churchill nor his millions of quoting admirers have ever explained is what they mean by democracy. Indeed, after decades of studying political theory--and discussing such matters with the learned and the wise--I still have no clue as to what people mean when they use the word, other than their opinion that democracy is decidedly a good thing.

Cheerleaders for democracy, the American way of life, and my sweet old etcetera tell us that the principles of one man/one vote and representative government are the essence of our democratic liberty. Interestingly, the people who are credited with inventing the institution and certainly gave us the word--I mean of course the Greeks--did not regard elections as particularly democratic.  

Real power, in principle, was invested in the assembly of the sovereign people. Officers had to be chose, but elections, so the ancient Athenians understood, can be bought by the rich, who can either pay directly for votes--as Joe Kennedy, apparently, did for his son Jack in the West Virginia Primary--or they can corrupt the voters by giving them free food--as the great Cimon did in Athens--or by promising to elevate the poor and servile above the rich and free, which many politicians have been doing for over 100 years.

Democracy means, literally, rule by the demos or people.  But what is the demos or people?  Is it everyone who happens to be living in a place or is it restricted, as it was in Athens, to free male adult citizens who are descended from citizens?  (Pericles, that great democrat, had a law passed restricting citizenship to people descended from both a citizen mother and a citizen father.)  

Athenians also used demos in the sense of the lower orders, anyone not rich or well-connected, and we invoke the majesty of "the people" in much the same enthusiastic tone.

But for the Athenians the demos was also a community withthin the commonwealth, an urban neighborhod or rural village.  Scholars now use the term "demes" to describe these little communities, but in Greek it is just demos.  It is a little like the Italian notion of the paese, which can mean both nation and village.

The Athenians, perhaps going back to Solon's day, employed two democratic principles:  1) a sorting out of the better candidates by tribes or communities.  This eliminated the riffraff, bankrupts, and trouble-makers from the pool,  2) selection by lot, which eliminated the possibility of buying the vote.  Our democatic systems, by contrast, is a fool-proof method for finding the least qualified political hacks who are then sold to the public by massive PR campaigns that could more appropriately be employed to market contaminated meat, Chinese-made appliances, or the sort of "music" promoted by Simon Cowell and Rick Rubin.

Politics in the modern state is primarily a method for pursuing power.  Whether that power has anything to do with the people's interests depends both on the quality of politicians and on the method by which they are selected.  Peter Laslett, one of the most acute political analysts of modern times, said that politics only took place in face-to-face communities, such as an Athenian deme, an English village, or the House of Commons.  The great structural problem in politics, then, was to bring the village communities into harmony with the house filled with political actors.  Laslett thought--and here he lapsed into naivete--that representative elections did the trick of reconciling popular communities with the ruling community.  They do not.  

Representative government was always a doubtful proposition, even when American politicians had to stump their states, going town by town, magniloquently addressing the voters in torch-light proccesions.  In some of the Southern states, voters still are able to meet the candidates.  When, 30 years ago in South Carolina, I was an even smaller nobody than I am today, I met our two senators and their principal aides, two governors, and my state legislators.  My father knew well our congressman and I was a friend of his nephew and successor.  Yes, they were nearly all crooks, but some of them would take my call, which is the most you can expect from a politician.

Whatever democracy once meant in ancient Athens or 19th century Switzerland has no relevance for a bloated and despotic bureaucracy that rules the lives of over 300 million people, telling them what materials can be used in their children's clothing, dictating the historical lies that fill our textbooks, promoting the fraud of synthetic fuels that raise the price of basic foods without contributing significantly to either cleaner air or energy independence.  If you are a television-watching American, you may regard this description as a sign of insanity.  My only response is to tell you to go out and vote for the party of your choice.  It's a free country, isn't it?