[I plan on publishing my second book soon, and this is the rough draft of its Introduction.] -
“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives . . .
“Above this race of [lay]men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate . . . It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing . .
“[This elite class] chooses to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security . . regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances ?what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living . . .
“It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd . . . till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd . . ” ?Alexis de Tocqueville
- -On Democracy, Revolution, and Society: Selected Writings, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980, ed. by John Stone and Stephen Mennel, quoted in Christianity and the Constitution, the Faith of our Founding Fathers by John Eidsmoe (Baker Books)
Ronald Reagan said, “For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told that there are no simple answers.”
FOR OVER SIX YEARS, SINCE 9/11/01, we’ve been wondering what the terrorists would do next. Maybe they don’t have to do anything; we are self-destructing anyway! Our public school system has been pushing generation XYZ through the “sex experimentation phase” earlier and earlier, so today’s college students can go on to “bigger and better things” ?such as, class consciousness, gender consciousness, and UNconsciousness.
I used to give the mainstream education Establishment too much credit. I thought that they were well-intentioned but just misguided. I have come to conclude that the dumbing down of the next generation has been planned on purpose ?because citizens-wthout-depth are easier to CONTROL. And I am Big Education’s worst nightmare.
I overheard more history in first grade than most college graduates now hear in a lifetime. I went to a “public school,” but it was a one-room country school. Prior to “consolodation” and “new” methods of teaching reading, we were able to learn how to read in six weeks’ worth of kindergarten. Today’s educrats can’t teach kids how to read in six years. They may be illiterate, but at least the kids think they’re TOLERANT. And by standards of yesteryear, even the professors are virtually illiterate!
Edmund Burke said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing, and Americans have been conditioned to avoid talking about “politics and religion” in public, to sort of live and let live (with the exception of the unborn children). Burke also said, “There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.”
We have reached that point! Virture itself is no longer a priority. I sit down to compile this book “with a countenance more in sorrow than in anger,” in the words of William Shakespeare.
President Reagan said, “We’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?” [Imprimis, March 2007]
The Gipper was simply echoing Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address. Jefferson said:
“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
“I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility [lack] energy to preserve itself? I trust not.
“I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order [or border?] as his own personal concern.
“Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question . . .
“Possessing a chosen country . . acknowleding and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensation proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter ?with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens ?a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
Since the kings of this “chosen country” started acting more like “angels” (or benefactors) than protectors of our border, and instead of restraining men “from injuring one another,” history has answered Jefferson’s question thusly:
Man can now fly to the International space station, or the moon, and back safely, but you can’t deliver a pizza in Milwaukee without getting shot dead. And to be more “gender-neutral,” even one of our astronauts was accused of plotting a murder. Thanks to “the spirit of the 60s,” we have come full circle. Thanks to the prevailing philosophy of nihilism in “higher education.”
By rights I ought to be writing a left-wing book:
I saw the last game played by the Rockford Peaches, as in “A League of Their Own,” so Rosie O’Donnell ought to love this book. I heard a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s brother and asked a question of him. I saw Jackie Robinson and Billie Bruton play against each other and they were two of my biggest heroes. And so is Clarence Thomas.
“HERO” has become a 4-letter word, however. The heroes of the American Revolution are castigated whenever they can’t be totally ingnored. History is history! It has been rolled over like bread dough and mingled with the leaven of “social science,” which is 95 percent “art” and 5 percent “science” ?but no history!
The American “experiment” was like the baby Moses floating on the water; all the Founding Fathers could do was give this “chosen country” a shove in the right direction. But now the “mainstream elites” are only taking us “down the river.” And if the Founders were realists about one thing, it was about human nature. That is why John Adams said that “This constitution was made for a religious people.”
When a candidate for President mentioned this in a major speech, the pretty young things reading the news almost went “like eeeww!” They acted as this were the first time they had ever heard of a John Adams. Maybe it was. Our learned “commentators” told us that Adams was all wet, even as families in Omaha were planning funerals for their dead loved ones, shot in a mall.
Even as Christians were being shot in Colorado, the mainstream media were mounting their horse and shouting, “The theocrats are coming; the theocrats are coming.” One could write a poem about it: “The Midnight Ride of the Anti-religionists,” but the late-night comics were without their union writers.
Not that I’m entirely anti-union. I belonged to a union for 12 years and without them I never would have been a “capitalist” (invested in the stock market). One could say modern life is “ironical,” but to a traditionalist such as myself, it’s a perfectly understandable PARADOX (something that would seem at first glance illogical, but is in fact the truth and logically so).
Any farmer could tell you that we reap what we sow, and I was in fact a farmer first. Ms. Clinton once said that she can’t see what was so good about the “olden days,” but I think that the county I lived in got through the 1950s without one murder, if I recall. Right now, cities such as Ben Franklin’s City of Brotherly Love are averaging more than one murder per day while the guides at Independence Hall expunge all reference to the religion of the Founding Fathers from their “lectures,” not unlike our college and university professors ?even while our politicians invite more and more gang-bangers across the border and throw Border Patrol agents into solitary confinement.
Not that I’m against “legal” immigration. My grandparents all came to this country through Ellis Island in the 1800s. In those days, you had to be certifiably healthy to become a citizen (healthy enough to work hard). My paternal grandfather’s first job was as a farm hand for a Taft family (we Swedes were a bit lower on the econonic totem pole, but my grampa was nevertheless a staunch anti-socialist). It took a few decades, but his descendants finally achieved the American Dream.
My father saw Buffalo Bill Cody and Teddy Roosevelt ?when he was running for President ?and my dad also was invited to Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural ball (based on a $10 gift, though we couldn’t afford to attend). My parents, who were married for over 50 years, conceived me in 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and perhaps that’s what the Japanese were so ticked off about (a little humor there).
I write a weekly column for Alan Keyes’ website, and the point of my coming book is that it’s time to pay some attention to some of our elder writers ?not just those fresh out of Journalism 101 ?before we ALL die off. And ?it’s high time for Generation XYZ to read the actual words of our Founding Fathers (who appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world” for the rectitude of their intentions) ?before it’s too late!
But “none are so blind” as our much-learned Left. George Orwell said, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”
Lady Margaret Thatcher said, “A society needs only one generation to abandon . . its culture, for that culture to become an alien, lifeless irrelevance . . [and] the cultural revolutionaries will drown out what Lincoln called the mystic chords of memory with jarring cacophony.”
As Michael Savage says, “We’ve gone from Beethoven to rap in one generation.”
Speaking of memories, I owe a lot as a writer to a couple of “dead white guys”: Jim Murray, a sportswriter, and to Jenkin Lloyd-Jones, the man who kept asking, “Have we reached the stomach-turning point yet?” I’d love to read what Murray would be writing about these days. He’d probably say:
“The worst thing about today’s athletes isn’t that they have to use steroids, but that they have to use Viagara.”
The union I belonged to had a member publication called The Line, and too many people stick to “the Line” of the mainstream pop culture, come hell or high water. The worst thing about the media-education-government complex is that it is now based on foreigners such as Charles Darwin and certainly NOT on our “Fathers” (neither our spiritual, nor national, Founders).
The summer 2006 issue of On Wisconsin reported that “A recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that three-fourths of Americans are dissatisfied with Darwin’s explanation of life. A Gallop poll last fall reached a similar conclusion, adding that a majority of the dissatisfied were educated men and women ?in fact college graduates . . and of those who did accept evolution, most considered the process so complex as to need the help from ‘an intelligent designer.’”
That’s the good news. The bad news is that this “immense tutelary power” doesn’t care what you think!
Someone said, “In China one can criticize Darwin, but not the government. In America, one can criticize the government, but not Darwin.” Thomas Jefferson would be shocked, because he spoke out against the old Greek fables of evolution that were being recycled in Merry Old England in the 1700s by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, bless his heart.
Jefferson would be simply amazed to learn that “error of opinion” can no longer be FREELY opposed with reason and truth.
Words mean things, it is said by Rush Limbaugh. Not necessarily anymore. Take the word “thongs,” which are no longer worn on the feet (one reason my subtitle is “Thinking outside the boxer shorts”). “Liberty” is now thought to mean the right to do anything and everything we WANT to do, not the right to do what we OUGHT, in the words of Lord Acton. That is now called “hate speech.”
WELL (as Reagan might say), in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, “If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”
Why did you think I was writing this book anyway? I was born on de Tocqueville’s birthday, and Dag Hammarsjkold’s, by the way, but enough about me!
“A PEARL IS AN OYSTER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY,” someone once said, and.the following book is my pearl. At least I gave it my best shot.
P.S. The coin of the realm, liberty, has two “flip” sides: rights and responsibility. There is no excuse for irresponsibility in a nation with a Heritage that is as deep as ours has. “Academic freedom” gives no one the right to turn our nation’s history on its head. Nor does freedom of the press, when the press is flippant with the facts.
By thinking outside the boxer shorts, I mean not thinking shallowly. Today’s “educators,” “journalists,” and politicians are so shallow that they don’t even see their own self-contradictions (or congnitive dissonance, as they would put it). They have no more use for the “politics” of the much-cited Martin Luther King, Jr. (or even Jackie Robinson’s) than they have for Clarence Thomas, Bill Cosby, or Alan Keyes.
The seeds have gone to weeds. All the “weeds” that the Baby Boomers smoked have borne bad fruits. The latest grisly murder (even grandmothers killed by grandsons) are so common that they’re reported on page three under “News in brief.”
As Charlie Sykes wrote in “A Nation of Victims,” “The results were not what the prophets of liberation had envisioned . . Instead of being freed from the oppressive bonds of the past, [man] found himself alone in a world without mooring, norms, sense of direction, or purpose.”
I know whereof I speak, because I’ve seen the fruits of nihilism first hand. I’ve lost seven close friends to murder. This book is dedicated as much to them as to you the reader.
I owe a lot, also, to some “dead white guys” who wrote centuries ago: The Logos, Jesus Christ, and Anglo-Saxon cousins such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who said:
“The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature . . If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties . . .
“What is truth, said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.”
“Las trahison des clercs (the treason of the [most highly] educated classes).” ?Julien Benda (1868-?)
I think he was paraphrasing P.T. Barnum, who may have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
american dream,amp,baby boomers,first glance,higher education,Novel,novel features,plo,religion,Train
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