Bent Notes

As of this writing, congressional leaders of both parties, both presidential candidates, and economic advisors are meeting in Washington to discuss the bailout plan W outlined in last night’s address to the nation.

The idea is that it will restore the financial system’s health quickly enough that the American taxpayer will realize a return on its outlay of $700 billion.  Sounds good, but also quite iffy.

It doesn’t look like a purely free-market solution to this is in the offing, since this catastrophe has its roots in a fuzzy melding of the public and private sectors.  That said, I hope and pray there will be a camp within the assemblage meeting with W that will press for the way forward that comes the very closest possible to such a plan.

As every grown-up knows, the other side of the freedom coin is responsibility.  Underneath the layers of bundled mortgages and deals and cleverly wrought instruments for growing wealth and government guarantees against failure lie actual exchanges of money for for promises to pay it back at a given interest rate.  Someone said, “Yes, I’ll loan you this amount of money on terms involving this amount of time for paying it back at this rate of return,” and someone else saying, “Okay, is this the dotted line where I sign?”  If either of them thought it unlikely that he or his organization could make good on what they were freely obligating themselves to, they’re not particularly wise individuals, are they?

Now, compound that by all the subsequent operators who saw home prices rising and said, “Hey, man, even if a lot of these loans are risky, bundling them together in this favorable market is a cool way to make some cheddar!”  We have to presume that the folks on this level understood the degree of risk in what they were doing as well.  Don’t we?

It looks to me like our culture’s zeal for ever-more slickly designed gizmos, with ever-more bells and whistles - think iphones and Blackberries and voice-activated GPS devices - permeated the financial world.  The main difference, it seems to me, is that microchips and plastic and steel and aluminum aren’t inherently risky substances.  You combine them into this product or that, and you can rely on them to do their thing as what they are.  Mortgages and other loans, in contrast, may, shall we say, decay over time.  They may fall prey to slow payment or even default.  This makes designing super-fancy financial products out of them kind of a shaky proposition.

So what I hope gets trumpeted loudly at the gathering in Washington today is this:  Let’s determine to the best of our ability who is responsible for each of the various aspects of this mess and hold them accountable as much as possible and minimize the burden to the American taxpayer, who needs to see his or her overall burden reduced anyway, as much as possible and as soon as possible.  Free people keeping their own hard-earned money is the real key to moving pst this perilous moment.

I think the appropriate way to regard the tofu-and-sprout-munching, peace-and-social-justice, agnostic, save-the-planet types - the ones who were the first on your street to get an Obama yard sign - is with pity.  The deepest kind of pity, the pity that’s just a microinch removed from scorn and contempt, but does qualify as pity.  For these people really swallow the lie.  They’re awash in Kool-Aid.  After all the evidence that their man is not only a fake, a Marxist and a liar but a thug, they still see him as the change-and-hope prophet he appeared to be last winter.

I’m not talking about the hate-crazed vanguard doing the flooding of radio station phone banks or hacking Sarah Palin’s e-mail account or cynically taking Rush Limbaugh quotes out of context for Spanish-language ads.  I’m not talking about the economic charlatans in his camp - most notably his running mate, he of paying-higher-taxes-is-patriotic fame - or the 9/11-was-America’s-chickens-coming-home-to-roost crowd.  I mean the nice folks down the block, the ones you see at the farmers market or the wine bar or your kids’ soccer matches.  The ones who, gosh darn it, just want things to be fair and peaceful.

About all that can be done in these remaining forty-plus days is to whittle away at their numbers.  As it becomes easier to expose the ugliness behind the big grin, the confident stride, the thoughtful tone of voice, those numbers can indeed be wuittled.

But remaining numbers there will be.  The enemy in this war has been quite effective at convincing them to sip the Kool-Aid.

Yes, war.  And what it is is the domestic front in the overall world war, the one that manifests itself in Iran’s uranium enrichment program, joint Venezuelan-Russian naval exercises, Russian invasion of Georgia, new and more powerful engines for North Korean long-range missiles, bombings in India, Iraq and Yemen.  It’s a war in which we face an array of enemies who share a hatred of the goodness that lies at the heart of our greatness.  We love freedom, we know it is a gift from almighty God, and we know it is the key to our prosperity and progress.  And they hate us for it.

So let the minions of the Marxist From Chicago “get in [your] faces.”  You’re prepared.  Meanwhile, take every opportunity to compel the nice folks down the street to wake up.  Feed them ideas. Lace your conversation with noble principles.  A lot of them can be convinced to value their own freedom and prosperity, to see truth and smell falsehood.  The rabid types are too far gone, but a lot of the nice folks down the street can be reached.

The pathetic and poisonous efforts of the left to destroy Sarah Palin gives the lie to the meme that the oh-so-moderate chin-stroking urban/coastal chattering class has been trying to get us to swallow for a while: the notion that the culture wars were winding down and Americans were now more concerned with efficient delivery of health care and energy and other dry, arcane considerations.

The delicious irony is that it’s that sector of our society that, so far, has been the most shrill and murderous about the Palin candidacy.  It’s the magazine writers, TV commentators and lefty bloggers who are pulling out all the stops in their attempt to wreck the governor’s career and life.

John Edwards was wrong about what comprised them, but he was right in his basic assertion that there are two Americas.  The division is deeper than it’s ever been.

As a historian, I am interested in the roots of the schism.  It certainly goes back farther than the 1960s.  The New Left movement in academic circles got going in the 1940s and 50s with the works of William Appleman Williams and C. Vann Woodward.  But the whole thing really goes back even further.  There’s the Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman, Walter Duranty’s puff-piece treatment of the USSR under Stalin.  Maybe it goes back to the salons in the Greenwich Village brownstones of the turn of the century.  American folk art is full of pairings of cousins, one a country bumpkin and one a city slicker, and I think that’s an element.  One could even make the case that the Enlightenment, which originated in Europe, with its forthright reliance on rationality and empiricism, paved the way.  In America, it led to a lot of offshoots from core Judeo-Christian thought, such as Unitarianism and the array of New Thought denominations.  Also, here one would need to concede that even such Founding Fathers as the Deist Jefferson were looking into interpretive ways to relate to scripture.  Still, relate to it he most definitely did.

In any event, at some point, a mindset ingrained itself into certain sectors of our society and spread to others.  It was based on a divorce from a foundational and commonly held set of assumptions that had, up to that point, been part of American life in such a broad sense as to be considered universal.  Church, family, gender differences, the relationship between industriousness and prosperity, sufficient understanding of human nature to make obvious the need for strong national defense - these were givens for pretty much everybody.

I was in the thick of the period when the Big Split became codified, when a sufficiently large plurality of citizens embraced it as to legitimize it in schools, workplaces and arenas of civic participation.  I sat in the back of high school math class and read Ramparts magazine and Do It! by Jerry Rubin.  I had shoulder-length hair, told my dad he was a fascist and a corporate fat cat. Spent days on end in the lysergic trenches.  Made a point of running as far away from square old Jesus as I could and insisting that some kind of all-is-one state of so-called reality constituted ultimate truth.

So I bear some culpability for the current diseased state of our precious nation.  What is so blessed about time, though, is that once you get smarter than you used to be, you can genuinely change.  You can pick a moment and declare, “That’s not me anymore.”

The horror, the ghastliness, of what the enemy in the culture wars is attempting to do to Sarah Palin has been a wake-up slap across the face for me.  I thought there was some tiny possibility that this was going to be a civil airing of differences, perhaps with some raised voices, close elections and strongly-worded polemics. 

No, this is an actual war.  My main encouragement about the odds for what is good and true prevailing stem from the resolve of those like the woman currently on the front line.  I think tonight she will serve notice that she can outgun any comers.

Did you hear what she said in response to someone’s question about whether she’s up to this state of affairs?  She posed a question and then answered it.  “Do you know the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” she asked.  And then she said, “Lipstick.”

Quite by coincidence, today’s blogosphere offerings bring us two items on the same theme.  Mike S. Adams at Townhall tells the tale of the young woman who, only after being referred by a Christian counselor with religious porblems with the young woman’s lesbianism to a counselor who had no such problems and did a fine job according to the young woman, decided to sic the leviathan state on the Christian counselor.  Bookworm gives us an account of a similar situation involving a San Diego fertility clinic.

Bookworm does an admirably effective job of spelling out the distinction between situations in which market choices prevail and those in which monopolyy conditions set the parameters.

And for heaven’s sake, you didn’t croak because you had to drive to another office for your fertility test, okay?

A few more thoughts occur to me along the vein of last night’s post about livingthe life of a closet-rightie. 

Clearly, the majority of my friends and associates are on the other side of the ideological fence from me.  It makes me cringe and gnash my teeth, but I know how they’ll vote in November. 

Most of them get their news and opinion on the fly as they maneuver through their daily lives - a little Today show or The View while on the treadmill at the gym, a little NPR during the daily commute, Time or Newsweek during the grooming-and-hygiene interlude, the op-ed page of their local paper, stuff that friends e-mail to them.

A few of them make a point of, as far as they understand the term, being highly informed.  They regularly check out The Nation, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Keith Olberman, Chris Matthews.

It’s this second tier that I’d like to consider here.  After all, they ostensibly have the most meat on the bones of their worldview.  They avail themselves of sources unabashedly self-identified as progressive.

As Bookworm and Neo-neocon say about such people in their lives, it’s clear from my observation of, and interaction with them that they are not dumb people.  Most have done quite well in live.   They live comfortably, travel, send their kids to fine colleges, contribute to the civic life of their communities.  This is why I am so confounded by their steadfast fealty to an ideology that has demonstrated its intrinsic failure in every area of public life: economics, culture, education, religion, and science.

Implicit in their dinner-party exchanges about how to get more Americans concerned about global warming, or how immoral US involvement in Iraq is, or how large corporations are greedy is that core assumption that America’s main identity is not that of a grand experiment in human liberty, but rather some kind of storehouse in which power and wealth exist of their own accord, andthat it’s just a matter of which classes or vested interests are going to control those commodities.

It’s an assumption that really goes back to Marx.  It’s the idea that there’s some kind of power structure that welcomes in those who demonstrate a cynical understanding of how the game works, and excludes those who insist on an egalitarian dispensing of access to the levers of success.  In this view of things, a revolution is required to put the egalitarians in charge of admission to the success network, and send the old power-brokers to the re-education camp.

The irony is that reality works in the exact opposite fashion.  When free-market economics, as laid out by Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, is combined with a keen understanding of the Judeo-Christian scriptural narrative and all it has to say about family and character and a devotion-filled heart, as well as a keen understanding of what history shows us about human nature and the evolution of the modern nation-state, you get the freest and fairest possible society.

Especially since the civil-rights triumph of forty years ago, there is truly no substantive obstacle to a United States citizen becoming or achieving whatever he or she envisions.  What is it you want to do?  If you equip yourself with a full toolbox of the character traits needed to accomplish it - a generally educated mind, knowledge of your field, a friendly dispostition that fosters a network of contacts, mentors and associates, a willingness to find out what material resources you’ll need, and an understanding that life is fluid and you’ll need to adapt to pretty much constant change - the only hassles that can possibly pose setbacks will be random occurrences of bum luck.

A further irony is that this is how these people I know who are personally successful but still harbor the leftist worldview got where they are.  What i cannot get to the core of - and, I think, still puzzles even conservatism’s greates minds - is why they can’t see the universal applicability of their own success stories.

It has something to do with this matter of control.  I used to divide leftists into two groups - those who sincerely believed that government was needed to make life more fair for unfortunate people, and those who were in it because it was a slick way to talk themselves into power.  I look at it a little differently now.  I think some sense that human beings ought to be controlled lies at the heart of even the do-gooder impulse.  Otherwise, these people would be able to see that they came to their quite favorable junctures- the American dream - without asking anybody’s permission.

Neo-neocon has offered her response to Bookworm’s post about staying in the closet as a conservative in the Marin County neighborhood where she lives.  Neo-neocon, who likes and admires Bookworm, nevertheless takes her to task for hiding her lamp under a bushel.

It’s a fine line.  Actually, all any of Bookworm’s neighbors would have to do is come across her blog and she’d be outed. 

 I run into the same quandary.  I’m a blues and jazz guitarist, an arts journalist, a food-show host and a cultural historian.  Most of my associates live and work in a university town and a tourist area.  My work environments are wine bars, art galleries, and university classrooms.  I don’t advertise my ideology in that milieu, but, hey, there’s a link to this blog from my main website.

Actually, I have made the acquaintance of two great guys about my age, guitarists, one from Asheville, North Carolina, and one from Minneapolis, who, after meeting me on musical ground, came here to BN, had a look around, and got back with me to express their solidarity.  They, too, say they have to be careful in their musical lives about letting their devotion to freedom, common sense and the great body of Western tradition show amongst their colleagues.

This arangement actually allows me to do some stealth research into the minds of left-leaners.  Little questions can be asked that offer clues to the depth of their thought processes without giving away my assessment of the quality of their conclusions.

For the first several installments of my newspaper column, I kept to innocuous subjects - my relationship with technology, why I play jazz, stuff like that.  Gradually I began wading into areas that required more honesty of me - gender differences, nuclear proliferation, the fallacy of greed as a factor in economics.  At this point, I pretty much let ‘er rip.  My last column was on the virtues required of individual people for a safe and fair society.

If you have an array of outlets of expression, what pans out is the different markets for the things you do.  My audience for Stirring Something Up, my readership for my column, my readership for my magazine work, and the fan base for my music have areas of overlap, but are mostly distinct from each other.  It’s working out nicely so far.  Something for everyone, I guess.

However, regular BN readers know the degree of my concern for this country and the civilization of which it is the vanguard.  I must say what I conclude as I survey the scene in this day and age when utter nonsense gets the same knd of hearing as adult discourse.  So I do know where my priorities lie.  Stating the plain truth for the record must be done.  The creativity will have to adapt to the reality of the world in which I practice it.

Have you heard of the Friends of Abe?  Very few beyond actor Gary Sinise and pretty-much-retired singer Pat Boone are willing to go public with their involvement, but you gotta wish them growth and influence.

Mike Adams gets involved in an embarrasingly stupid situation at one of my employers, IUPUI.

Barack Obama’s embarrassed about the number of Americans who don’t know any other language besides English.  Let that sink in.  He’s comparing us to the the Europeans, portraying you and me as rubes and the morally relative, post-Judeo-Christian, dhimmitude-infected citizens of the continent with the fastest-shrinking population on Earth as the sophisticates we should emulate.

The benefits of being multiligual are beside the point.  Of course, it would be advantageous to our society in myriad ways if more of us knew more tongues.  The significance of Obama’s remark, however, is that it must be added to the list that includes his arugula moment in Iowa, his characterization - made in San Francisco - of small-town Midwesterners as religion-and-gun clingers, and his wife’s assertion tha she’d never been proud of her country until her husband’s campaign got going. 

This is what I was talking about in my Independence Day post.  We may be past the tipping point.  We have so decimated the idea of a common culture and a sense of what makes America great that we not only confer legitimacy on an arrogant-yet-empty charlatan like the Marxist From Chicago but we make him a rock star - inded, a messiah.

And the fact that we’ve made messiahs out of our rock stars for decades paved the way for this phenomenon.  When people slobber all over the memory of drunkard and wife beater John Lennon as if he were some man of vision, a prophet of peace, or canonize a polygamist like Bob Marley as some kind of modern-day Moses leading “his people,” whoever they are, out of some kind of imagined bondage, or confer sainthood on cocaine-and-masturbation freak Marvin Gaye just because he recorded the song “What’s Going On,” which, upon examination, is a a defense of urban troublemakers, a condemnation of the US attempt to save South Vietnam from Communism, and an apologetic for long hair on males, we soften ourselves up for a con job with truly serious consequences.

Remember when Michelle Obama said that her husband would require things of us?  Keep that in mind.  He’s already talking about some kind of national service for young adults. He’s already said, in that speech in Oregon, that thermostats set at 72 degrees wouldn’t cut it.  Do you think he was just trying to suggest we become more multilingual?

Have you really focused your powers of envisioning on what a Freedom-Hater monopoly on elected power in Washington would look like?  Who will stop them from wealth redistribution, mandating adherence to junk science, finishing off Christianity and Judaism once and for all, destroying the notion of family that has been the bedrock of Western civilization - indeed, every civilization that’s contributed anything to the world - for thousands of years, marginalizing our native tongue, and establishing a protected status for a privileged class that congratulates itself on its refined tastes and ability to discern nuance?

Of course, such a society could not long survive, especially when its leaders hold manliness and self-preservation in disdain.  A brief period of totalitarian rule would be followed by our conquest by some combination of our external enemies.

I wish I could be light about this, leave it at the level of what’s amusing about it, maybe find something clever or even sardonic about it andthen move on to some interesting distraction.  The thing is, I remember when this country had a chance.

Dennis Prager on Rene Marie singing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” atthe Denver mayor’s State ofthe City address.

Mary Grabar on the significance of Oprah giving the commencement address at Stanford - and leaving copies of A New Earth and A Whole New Mind on each graduate’s seat.

Independence Day finds BN waxing reflective like many another punditry outlet.  The word “paradox” keeps surfacing as the most apt characteristic for the juncture at which this marvelous country finds itself on the 232nd occasion of the signing of Mr. Jefferson’s thunderous document.  Comparatively speaking - compared, that is, to other nations, and to other periods in time - we’re doing great.  We are, however, beset by some unique and unprecedented challenges, some of which ualify as threats requiring a sense of urgency.

I can’t argue with such sunny perspectives as those of Ed Fuelner’s Townhall column, or Victor Davis Hanson’s NRO piece.  Such problems as high oil prices, the mortgage-market upheaval, and even the array of undeniably hostile countries and forces on the world stage aren’t making much of a dent at this moment in our ability to exercise our freedom, enjoy our prosperity, invent, consume, wander, wonder, form and raise families, worship, not worship, become civic leaders or become hermits.  We’re comfortable, secure and free beyond the imaginings of most human beings alive either today or at any time in the past.

To call that the end of the matter, however, is to turn a blind eye to some glaring aspects of everyday life.  We are not okay.

Our most immediate threat is moral and intellectual atrophy.  We no longer have any idea how our circumstances came to be, their real value, or what’s required to preserve them.

The most handy piece of evidence to offer in substantiating this assertion is the Democrat candidate for president: a member of the Senate for three years, an Illinois state senator before that, and a “community organizer” in the mold of the radical Saul Alinsky before that.  His radicalism, his ambivalence (at best) about America’s greatness, his ties to both Marxists and corrupt Chicago-machine figures, his cultural elitism, and his phony religiosity are well enough known that in a country with solid intellectual and moral bearings, he would be an embarrassment with no chance of going past a couple of primary races.

It’s not as if anyone were offering a hopeful alternative, either.  The current administration is apparently going to let Iran build, test and use a nuclear weapon, and let North Korea keep its asernal of same, along with its uranium-enrichment capabilities, and its network for proliferation.  It’s also the bunch that is determined to get Israel to allow a state to a group of people dedicated to its obliteration.  Obama’s opponent in the current race to succeed this administration is a vacuous, tired and stubborn has-been who thinks we shouldn’t drill in ANWR and has a problem with corporate profits over some arbitrary level (at which they become, in his worldview, “obscene”).

Our preoccupation with silly, fabricated non-issues that distract us from what ought to be our real concerns is another manifestation of our atrophy.  When corporations and universities alike rush to form “diversity councils,” when federal judges find “rights” to homosexual “marriage,” when developers rush to build “green” housing units and commercial structures, it is clear our ability to muster rigor and clear-sightedness is slipping away.

When you opened your web browser home page just now, you saw yet another ominous sign of our emaciation.  Where were the headlines dealing with issues of economic challenge, jihadist design or nuclear proliferation?  Well underneath coverage of the attire or the sybaritic antics of celebrities who have no more qualification to be pop-culture icons than Barack Obama has to be a presidential candidate.

Yes, our most pressing problems - after this breakdown of our moral and intellectual health - could be solved fairly easily, but that’s a lot like saying the stroke victim could easily reach the water glass beside his bed.

It’s a fine Fourth.  I’ve seen happy people all over town as I’ve driven and biked about.  I’ll be throwing a T-Bone and a mahi-mahi filet on the grill this evening.  I’m about to pour myself a sparkling cocktail.  Checks are in my mailbox and gigs on my calendar.  I know lots of people who love the one true God and who understand free-market economics.  Somehow, though, it all has the feel of the last tune the orchestra on the Titanic played before dance partners in the ballroom started to say to each other, “Did you feel that?”

Michael Weiss at Pajamas Media details the nature of Bloomberg’s stint as NYC mayor.  A classic portrait of an opportunist who has been so busy climbing some percieved success ladder while harboring vague notions of what he ought to care about on a policy and overarching-philosophy level that he’s a hugely easy mark for every goofball Freedom-Hater in the book.  A whole city suffers as a result. 

Money line: “The kind of velvet fascism that rules American corporate culture now rules Gotham.”

Mary Grabar’s piece on Townhall today on why an Obama victory would mean the Left’s victory in the culture wars.

I think I’ll let her know that I, too, am one of those “few teachers in humanities departments who must hide their views and work on the fringes.”

A 1999 column by Thomas Sowell that remains thunderously relevant.

Another opinion writer who is definitely in the pantheon of top practitioners of that craft (see invitation in post below to kick around who might comprise the top five) is Roger Kimball.  To scroll down his posts at Pajamas Media is to have your sense of the gorgeousness of truth sharpened.

A recent piece of his has as its thrust a reconsideration of recent conservative gloom about conservatism’s prospects.  He offers another view, but, as one would expect from a towering giant of a wordsmith, he does much more.  He offers, for example, a consideration-warranting look at where conservatives on one hand and Freedom-Haters on the other find levity and pessimistic prospects in life.

A technique marvelous writers sometimes use is the placement of a quote from another great writer in their work that is an irreplaceable gem.  Kimball has done that here with this nugget from Lord Falkland: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

Alice Walker’s daughter on the deterioration of their relationship and the dark, barren nether regions of feminism.

When looking for moral clarity, you can’t do better than Dennis Prager.  Today, he lays out the scope of magnitude of the California Supreme Court’s recent decision on gay “marriage.”

He made warm, human, unmistakably American music and he was a classy gentleman, which is to say he represented a vanishing breed.  Preceeded in passing by his wife of 66 years by two months, which I always take as an indication of inseparable soulmates.

Crispin Sartwell on the cultural legacy of LSD.