Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Rush is resting comfortably after being admitted to a Honolulu hospital for chest pains. Prayers for a speedy recovery to one of the world’s indispensible upholders of freedom, common sense, human dignity, and the notion that life should basically be a joyful adventure.
John Bolton says Dick Cheney is the Conservative of the Year.
Bookworm Room gives us a good pep talk on staying fierce and busy. She points out that Hugo Chavez’s speech in Copenhagen lays bare like nothing else (save, perhaps, Robert Mugabe’s speech to the same assemblage) what’s at the core of the FHer vision.
We will not lose, because we are not wrong.
Some real champions of freedom, Indiana Revolt.org, are on Facebook now:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=202824623249
Of course, tonight the Aquarian Totalitarian throws his Hail-Mary pass for socialist health care on Capitol Hill. I have to be out of town this evening, so I may not get to watch it live.
I remember when the H-Word Creature made a fuss about our nation’s health care system in 1993. At the time, I thought, what an odd domestic issue to make such a focal point out of. I mean, a person decides to either carry or not carry health insurance, based on a number of factors such as one’s general health, one’s income, one’s priorities and one’s plans. You get sick, you go get treated for it, and you pay the deductible, or you pay the whole thing.
Milton Friedman famously asked why companies shouldn’t offer food benefits, since food is even more essential to basic existence than health insurance.
I’m a pretty simple person by nature. I try to keep my worldview and my ideas for public policy as uncomplicated as possible. It seems to me that what’s called for is completely portable insurance, with no weird tax implications for making one insurance choice over another. I ought to be able to buy a policy from Pheonix, Arizona, or Bangkok, Thailand, for that matter, if the price and provisions suit me. It further seems to me that catastrophic insurance with a fairly high deductible is what most people need. Some may also want some incidental insurance of the Aflac variety. Other than that, one ought to lead a healthy lifestyle, not run to the ER for every case of the sniffles, and not sue doctors for things that weren’t their fault. If you get some serious but treatable malady, go see a doctor or a nurse practitioner, get treated and pay for the service out of pocket.
I think the reason Freedom Haters latched on to health care as a key issue is that it’s easy to make it look like something that ought to be a right. Good health has a lot to do with being sure you’re going to keep living, right?
But that’s what makes the whole undertaking so insidious. Nothing is more personal than tending to one’s health. As I’ve said in a previous post, “health care” encompasses so much of life that it’s easy for the state to insert itself into every aspect of our lives once it gains a toehold.
Key things to stay on top of this week: any “compromise” talk or triggers or cooperatives, how abortion is dealt with, how tort reform is dealt with, and, most importantly, whether this notion of health care being some kind of right gets properly quashed.
Every time I think my alarm and disgust at the regime that has been gripping America’s throat since mid-January can’t ratchet up any further, a few new developments come along, I consider them in the context of all that has transpired, and my alarm and disgust take a quantum leap once again.
The house is on fire. America is being destroyed by the minute.
The very latest development in this process is the upcoming TCM direct address to school children across the country. As with so many of these undertakings, it will be easy for his minions in the state-run MSM and hard-left side of the punditry world to throw up a smokescreen, for TCM will indeed encourage the kids to study hard and strive for academic excellence. This will be beside the point. The key element of this is in the set of questions the students will be asked to answer, and the key question among these is “How can I help the president?”
“How can I hep the president?” Help him do what?
The same question is being asked of the nations painters, writers, musicians and “cool people” by the National Endowment for the Arts. The conference call among them, organized by the NEA, Rock the Vote, United We Serve, and the White House Office of Civic Engagement (how’s that for a creepily-titled instument of totalitarianism?), was moderated by NEA’s Director of Communications Yosi Sergant. He led off by excitedly characterizing his project as a “brand new conversation” and that he and his associates were still ferreting out “what that looks like legally.”
“Help the president.”
Sergant wasn’t shy about spelling out the fact that this was what he wanted the nation’s creative types to band together to do. He enumerated the four big areas of TCM’s emphasis that he wanted the artists to “push”: energy, health care, education, and the environment.
There it is on full display: complete vindication of BN against any charges of hyperbole when warning that TCM and the Freedom-Hater party in control of the administration and Congress and the MSM have a totalitarian mission. This is about propaganda art. This is Stalinism.
I’ve done some posts in the past few days and weeks on some of the other recent developments that have made my hair stand on end. It’s time to see them all as of one piece and let that fully sink in:
Van Jones, the Marxist “green jobs” advisor
Mark Lloyd, the Marxist FCC “Chief Diversity Officer”
John Holdren, the “window-of-maximum-life-quality” science advisor
Harold Koh, the trans-nationalist top legal dog at the State Department
Cass “why-we-need-the-second-bill-of-rights” Sunstein, head of the White House Office on Information and Regulatory Affairs
Ezekiel Emmanuel
A few posts ago, I wrote of tweaking my main website and rebranding my professional work as a writer, musician and teacher. There’s much to consider. I have a lot of long-standing associations and friendships. I am keen to act on more opportunities. Will my forthrightness about what I see happening to our culture and country help me? It’s not likely. I can’t be silent, though. I will not sit idly by and watch what had been the United States of America become Cuba writ large.
One frequent BN commenter said back in the winter, just a few weeks into TCM’s term, “You’re going to hammer him from the get-go, aren’t you. Can’t you give the guy a chance?”
A chance to do what? I saw this coming. I saw it coming over a year ago.
I’m afraid, but I’m not cowed. That’s because I’m not alone. There are millions of Americans who love freedom, and we are finding each other. And fighting back. We have to. We want to sleep at night.
Red State passes along beautiful and glorious numbers from Rasmussen.
Geoffrey Hunt at American Thinker says that the main reason for TCM’s breathtaking rate of decline is that “he’s not one of us.” He doesn’t mean in a birther sense, obviously, just in terms of his character makeup and cultural frame of reference. In a nutshell, he holds basic human freedom in utter disdain, and he’s small.
Sink, FHers, sink!
As I’ve said, though, the swing don’t mean a thing if we’re not ready to fill the vacuum. Solid principles, and compelling presentation of, and unwavering fealty to them. A half-baked alternative is no alternative at all.
Zogby Interactive has TCM’s approval number at 45 percent. In and of itself, this is a beautiful and glorious development. It doesn’t guarantee an ushering-in of any kind of Western rennaisance or new Golden Age of Freedom, however. It does create a vacuum that we – and I hope it’s clear to BN readers how I’m using “we” here – can view as an opportunity.
Americans are disaffected. They’ve had their sense of possibility, of their sense of truly unifying identity, even their sense of stability and basic continuity, blown apart by the very man whose publicity machine had touted him as the watershed, guardian and embodiment of all things good. The big question is whether this disillusionment will lead to nihilism or a reawakening of the uniquely American vision.
I’m not the first to say to the conservative movement, “Knock it off with the internecine squabbles,” but it’s important for it to continue to be said. To it I would also add, “Check your worldview for any kinky preoccupations.” We all know that conservatism does have schools within it that have elements that are difficult to reconcile. The paleos are isolationist. The neos don’t like truths to be stated too bluntly. The libertarians see little or no room for discussions of morality in our national conversation.
Think deeply about what made America exceptional. What accounts for our energy, our inventiveness, our generosity, the depth of our character?
We can see from recent poll numbers that recognition of the God-given freedom at the core of who we are is lying dormant, but the statists haven’t killed it off.
It’s our time again. It isn’t being handed to us, however. It’s entirely possible for another figure of the same poisonous odor as TCM to step into the vacuum, much as Germany shook off National Socialism only to allow its eastern half to have Soviet-style socialism imposed on it almost immediately.
Think deeply about freedom, common sense, decency, dignity, what history tells us about human nature. And consult God on a moment-by-moment basis. And don’t fall for anything or anyone that doesn’t pass your smell test. Ever again.
Who would have thought that late summer 2009 would be the time in which we would be up against make-or-break prospects for what we’ve known as the United States of America? There may have been a few other such times - 1864, 1941, 1968 – but I suspect that what saw us through those previous episodes of diciness was a conviction, however latent, in the minds of a sufficiently large portion of the American populace that we were blessed, divinely guided, big, and resilient enough to survive and prevail.
I’m encouraged to believe in such resilience, ruggedness and reverence at our current juncture when I see each new set of Rasmussen poll numbers, as well as angry crowds at the August-recess townhalls. What keeps me from embracing utter certainty is the fact that we are – rightly – determined to see this through in a lawful and civil way, while our enemies in their current manifestation are perfectly willing to pull out any extra-constitutional stops necessary to defeat us and replace the United States of America with their totalitarian vision.
Why health care? Why is that the particular “domestic issue,” to frame this momentous matter in its most mundane way, the one on which such fateful consequences turn?
I think it’s because it is the one area of human life perfectly calibrated to encroach upon people’s most intimate areas of sovereignty without their immediately thinking that it has been encroached upon. Milton Friedman used to ask why we assume that organizations that employ us should offer health insurance as part of our compensation, and not, say, food. After all, he reasoned, food is an even more immediate need than medical attention. Well, that is exactly why the Freedom-Haters have, going back to the H-Word Creature’s attempts at this in 1993 – actually all the way back to the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 – been able to fine-tune their pitch to reach what they hope is an appealing balance between policy-wonk-level rigor and an emotionally charged message of urgency. Food would be a human need too far. We still have enough sense of personal autonomy that we reserve the right to put what we damn well please in our mouths. Witness the number of discarded Polar Pop cups and Taco Bell wrappers one sees lying along any thoroughfare in the land.
Actually, the matter of food will be one of the first things to be encompassed by socialist health care. Cost and the need for preventative considerations will be constantly thrown up in our faces.
Therein lies another aspect of the beauty of health care as the issue of choice for the dismantling of America in the eyes of the Freedom-Haters. There is no part of life that ultimately can’t be considered a matter of health care. Under the banner of looking out for our mental health, all kinds of censorship becomes possible. Under the banner of stress management, all kinds of minute and arcane restrictions on where we go and how we spend our time can be imposed. It will dovetail perfectly with the green agenda, as no one will want to burden the system with undue expenses related to respiratory or circulatory disorders brought on by dirty air or water.
Abortion advocacy will be a cakewalk once the Peter Singer / John Holdren notion of what “authentic human life” is informs decisions about allocating resources related to saving lives that, without intervention, will be lost. One can see how it will be a short leap for left-of-center “religion” in America to get behind heavy reliance on hospice programs in the name of “the common good” and “personal dignity.”
The reason this issue, crytallized into a debate about “public-option”-based legislation, has flared into a red-hot struggle testing our most fundamental bonds as citizens of one republic is that the stakes couldn’t be higher. If we win, the United States of America has a chance. If the Freedom-Haters win, it’s all over.
And don’t even bother wasting your reading time on news accounts of “compromise” deals. Those afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome are completely inconsequential. Compromise is just another way to surrender.
Lee Cary at The American Thinker sees the growth of a resistance to TCM / FHer rule much like the spirit of resistance that fueled a groundswell among colonists in the 1770s, or that which caused young men to pour out of college dormitories in the days following December 7, 1941 and enlist to defeat the gathering threats in two hemispheres.
Cary observes that the FHer members of Congress on August recess aren’t used to anything but Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome as the mode of “opposition.” As he puts it, “The resistance doesn’t speak Beltway.”
Pundit and Pundette have a fine overview of the current juncture in the liberty-lovers’ resistance to the state / party apparatus’s attempt to shove socialism down our throats. They do a very effective job at contrasting the genuine passion based on being informed that the liberty-lovers are exhibiting with the color-coordinated stagings of the public-employee-union thugs on the left.
Go back and read the Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank utterances on private insurance companies to which I’ve linked in recent posts below. They couldn’t be making their agenda more plain. These . . . people . . . hold free-market economics, and the whole notion of individual initiative and opportunity and choice in the most extreme kind of contempt. Their statements give the lie to this notion that there would be “competition” between the “public option” and what the government would be offering. What an absurd idea.
The “public option” would never have to worry about showing a profit. It would have no marketing costs. Try setting up such conditions for “competition” in any other arena of business – hair styling, clothing retailing, carpentry, food service – and see how long someone without government support would last in the “marketplace.”
This issue constitutes the line in the sand. If we are not fierce and unwavering in taking our stand on this one, we can count on our society operating on the Cuban model by Christmas.
I guess you’ve noticed that lately I haven’t posted much beyond links to items about new developments on a number of fronts – health care, TCM’s exacerbation of the Skip Gates situation. It’s not for lack of such developments; they come down the pike hourly now. (A terror group based in North Carolina with one member still loose?)
What I’ve been looking at is the utter, grim predictability of our current juncture. I mean this on the level of TCM and the FHer-controlled Congress as currently composed, but also on a scale that involves looking back along a much longer timeline.
Where we find ourselves economically and politically in this country is the result of a gain in momentum much like that in the realm of nuclear proliferation. We can employ hindsight to spot precient portents in the designs of Iran and North Korea going back thirty years – really, more, in North Korea’s case. Likewise, we can see, upon examining what FDR was up to as far back as 1933, where that vector would lead without a sufficient check on its force. The signs became even more egregious in the mid-60s, with LBJ’s War on Poverty and Great Society measures. What keeps that from being more clear than it is as a harbinger of our present perilous state is the fact that LBJ at least still embodied the anti-Communism that tempered the domestically collectivist leanings of Truman and JFK. This, of course, made LBJ a square old warmonger in the minds of the radicals. Beginning in 1968, when LBJ bowed out of the scene and the rock-and-roll ethos thoroughly permeated all aspects of our culture, the radicals moved in to combine welfare-state collectivism with their own Aquarian peacenik notions of a world that could move beyond war. Between then and the 1972 election cycle, they went to law school and went to work for news media and generally came to “work within the system,” ala Saul Alinsky. Beginning that year, with the candidacy of George McGovern, the Democratic Party put forth radical, post-American candidates for President and seats on Capitol Hill pretty consistently. They ususally lost in presidential races, except in the cases of the victories of Carter and Clinton, when the GOP had committed some blunder that couldn’t help but drive the voting public away. The Democractic party became, as we here at BN emphasize every chance we get, the repository of freedom-hatred in the United States.
And, of course, in 2008, the FHers fielded their most radical slate to date, starting at the top with TCM. It was the perfect storm of political circumstances – a handsome, glib, fairly hip, fairly new candidate whose ethnic makeup providedthe ideal means for liberal Americans to assuage the racial guilt they had continued to impose on themselves decades after the civil rights movement had achieved victory. His attributes were so compelling that they easily put the kibbosh on any talk of his radical upbringing or radical associations since becoming an adult.
As many pundits have said – and you’re seeing more of this recently – he never overtly tried to conceal what he was about. He just knew that his confluence of qualities tailor-made for a celebrity-worshipping culture would relegate examination of his radicalism to the back burner.
And now the fruits of what we’ve chosen are upon us. A faux-stimulus bill that was really a porkfest, a budget that saddles the country with a debt level never seen, and government-owned car companies and banks.
Even if the rest of the agenda, which includes the real centerpieces of it all, cap-and-trade and socialist health care, never gets enacted, this nation is seriously damaged.
That’s the kicker, though. Cap-and-trade passed the House. It seems unlikely to pass the Senate, at least in Waxman-Markey form, but then again, the fact that hundreds of ostensibly sane grown-ups, elected by the ostensibly freedom-loving and well-informed public, have taken it as far as they have doesn’t speak well of the maturity level or the spiritual fortitude of our small-r republican form of self-government as we actually put it into practice. Freedom-Hater-style health care seems to be cracking up in the face of public opinion that gets more negative by the day, but let us not forget the determinatin of radicals to achieve their aims. Their means for doing so do not necessarily have to be Constitutional.
So we have a president without a partiotic bone in his body, whose vision has nothing to do with the United States of America as Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, or even Wilson, LBJ or Carter understood the concept. Our president and his ideological soulmates in leadership positions in Congress are deliberately wrecking the economy. They are so convinced of their Aquarian messianic powers that they won’t and can’t behave the way normal human beings who love freedom, dignity, common sense and civilization would when dealing with the likes of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hizbollah.
So I’ve been marinating in my alarm and disgust, and trying to act upon my inspiriations to be a force for the opposite of what’s prevailing in the society in which I live. I write this blog. I hopefully make music that ennobles those who listen to it. In my personal life, I strive to be a good husband, friend, citizen of my community and seeker after God, doing what I can to imbue my household with a sense of fun, safety and an atmosphere where virtues such as loyalty, integrity and commitment to clarity are upheld.
I’d like to see more signs than I do that we’re going to squeak by without major discomfort. I mean major, of the kind that Cubans experience daily. We’ve had way too many brushes with the unthinkable lately for me to sanguinely assume that to be the case.
I think what it boils down to is a race between the American people getting a clue – which is happening, much to my delight and relief – and the ability of our Freedom-Hating overlords to pull any more fast ones over on us.
The Oscar Arias-mediated attempt – by somebody or another – to get Honduras to go mushy on its own constitution has broken down. Only term in this BBC report I would take issue with is “crisis.” This isn’t a crisis. The Supreme Court and the Army tossed Zelaya out for illegally trying to extend his presidency. Now things are back to normal and the OAS, the UN and TCM all need to shut up about it.
Great Townhall column by David R. Stokes today on the difference between the American and French revolutions – and Thomas Paine’s unfortunate philosophical deterioration as his writing career progressed.
Another concept I’ve put forth that I’ve subjected to self-questioning, as much like hyperbole as it sounds on first encounter, is the notion that the United States of America may be a thing of the past. Alas, three Pajamas Media writers have Independence Day columns up today in which they wonder the same thing. You can find them here, here and here.
These writers share my concern that we have irretrievably lost sight of that which made this nation free, strong, righteous, inventive, vibrant and unique. Our enemies sense it. Our friends and allies seem to sense it as well, given the rightward direction of recent elections in Europe, South Korea and Israel. They’re starting to question the wisdom of sitting idly by and waiting for a hyperpower to have their backs. In fact, that kind of assumption on the part of the individual citizens of this country has a lot to do with what got us to our current distressing juncture.
Any road back will not be a matter of business as usual, of putting up the same old kinds of hopeful figures to be put through the same old political hoops. If the United States of America can be brought back from its flatline status, it will be by heroes and visionaries with entrails on fire.
No aspect of my polemical writing – in particular, my BN blogging – brings me as much castigation as my use of the term “freedom-hater.” I’m frequently accused of casting my lot with those who are coarsening public discourse and engaging in superficiality. I’m sometimes told that the term is clearly just a means for venting hate, and makes me no different from the average Kos blogger who sees Republican politicans and corporate executives and evil, greedy or stupid.
Here’s the difference. The term “freedom-hater” is quite specific in what it characterizes. Here at BN it gets applied to those who would limit individuals’ choices in the free market, try to set up moral equivalency between Western nation-states and its enemies, and use the courts to legislate. If asked to do so, I can provide substantiation for my application of it to any person. I hope there’s nothing unclear about why TCM, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, The H-word Creature, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, George Soros, the editorial board of the New York Times, Greenpeace, ACORN, La Raza, Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez and the Iranian mullahs fit this label. They are all on record as having advocating the curtailing of freedom in one of the three ways enumerated above.
I carefully thought about this term before starting to use it some time ago – its cadence, its accuracy, whether or not it encompasses all I felt it needed to encompass, whether it reflected marurity on my part of not. I decided it was spot-on and have no qualms about using it frequently.
After all, on this 233rd Independence Day, it’s questionable whether the first nation to be founded on the idea of freedom still exists. And that’s because those who hate freedom have mainstreamed their way into the highest echelons of power.
Not only in the comment threads here at BN but also in plentiful supply in the media and society generally we see supposed substantiation for arguments in favor of collectivist economics and against capitalism. The three main areas where this crops up these days is when the conversation turns to health care, banking or energy (although a recent comment thread here also brought agriculture into the proceedings.)
The basic argument is that corruption and greed are inseperable from the profit motive. What I feel is important to point out is that examples that are cited to bolster this notion generally have to do with people and institutions that got busted for laws that are already on the books. In other words, we have legal safeguards in place in our society to prevent and / or stop any unethical manipulation of the free exchange of goods and service by free individuals freely forming various types of associations. In short, to point out something that Enron or Bernie Madoff or Lilly got in trouble for proves nothing about the viability of a particular economic system.
Now, although it should be unnecessary to do so due to the irrefutable obviousness of it, I will assert afresh the basic principle that profit is the key to a healthy society and the advancement of human well-being. Profit is what’s left over after a business enterprise has covered all its costs. It can be saved, invested in other enterprises, distributed to shareholders, used for research into new and improved products, made available to increase the pay of staff members, or all the above. It is how an individual or organization knows whether it is succeeding or failing.
As for this matter of greed, I will once again point out the fallaciousness of the idea that it plays some kind of important role in a free market. You can’t ask more for your product or service, whether you’re selling a business’s product or negotiating pay for a job you seek, than the market will bear. The party in a postion to cut you a check will say, “This doesn’t meet my needs and expectations” and go elsewhere.
Does one party in an economic exchange have to swallow hard sometimes? Of course. This gets to the even more basic level of truth about reality upon which economic principle is based: All life is a tradeoff. No one in the world can guarantee you all your fondest wishes and grandiose dreams. You must, in an economic trasaction, find that point at which cost and benefit seem like something desirable to you.
Any alternative to this brings in some third party besides buyer and seller. We all know what that party ultimately comes down to: the coercive power of the state to distort this arena of freely arrived-at agreement in the name of some kind of phantom “fairness.”
