Bent Notes

Frequent BN visitors know that one of my stops each morning as I get the pulse of this world is Townhall.com.  Sometimes it turns out that two or more columns on a given day seem to be of a piece.  (I’ve sometimes wondered whether e-mail conversations create the fertile ground for great minds to think alike, or whether it’s all mere coincidence.)  Anyway, today, Dennis Prager’s column on falsifying the score of a Little League baseball game and Janice Shaw Crouse’s column on General Peter Pace’s comments on homosexuality, when taken together, provoke thoughts along the lines of the soundness of our cultural foundations.

I’m casting about for an idea for my next Republic column (due by noon next Monday).  There may be something in this fertile soil that can germinate for me.

This whole notion of feelings, relativity, prolonged adolescence, maiking our institutions up as we go along - I’ve pondered such things quite a bit.  What Crouse and Prager have to contribute is useful indeed.

I have just undertaken my first banishing of a Bent Notes comment-thread poster.  It’s someone to whom I gave wide leeway for several weeks.  I busted my tail end to accord him some respect and engage him in conversation in order to see more clearly how he came about his views.  However, it became obvious that he went beyond even customary moonbat levels of hysteria.  His problems with Israel make Jimmy Carter’s viewpoint look positively Zionist by comparison.  Every time I would make the most concise assertions, with the implicit willingness to go into them more fully, he would launch into rants of the most strident and overheated kind.  (Example: I’m a “devil with darkness in my heart.”)  He had no curiosity as to how I came about my views on Israel or anything else.

We get a fairly wide array of viewpoints here at BN.  Folks who hang out here to any degree know I have no problem with folks posting lefty views in the comment threads.  I will respond with facts where that seems approproate, or an invitation to the other person to consider a wider perspective, or just some reflection.  But I have neither the time nor the inclination to respond to pages-long litanies of allegations, put forth with no sense of a broad historical perspective, on a point-by-point basis.  It proves nothing.

And, I will add,  I really have no use for rock lyrics in a polemical exchange.  The Billy Jack theme song?  Puh - leeze.