Bent Notes

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.

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?”

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.”

Several blogs have weighed in on the poll of high-school students fashioned by history professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland regarding the ten most famous Americans of all time.  While the question “who do you think is most famous?” is rather unproductive (”No, this star sold more records!” “No, this politician was mentioned more times in newspaper articles!”), the top ten as pronounced by the poll results is a telling list.  I would imagine the students actually went with what I would have gone with: who was most influential, or had the greatest impact on U.S. history.  Still the answers are further justification for discouragement about the future of our society.  There were some pretty dumb and off-the-wall selections.  Oprah Winfrey?  Marilyn Monroe?

Let’s throw it open here at BN.  Let’s do use the “most influential” criterion.  I don’t know how you’d measure fame or what tht would tell us that would be of any use.

So, I’ll kick things off.  And, being the blogmeister, I reserve the right to post an entirely different list later based on changing my mind.

These aren’t necessarily in order.

Abraham Lincoln

Henry Ford

Dwight Eisenhower

W.C. Handy

John Dewey

Ralph Peer

Ezra Pound

Irving Berlin

David Sarnoff

Franklin Roosevelt

I can see already that I’ll be making another list.  It’s a thought-provoking exercise.

In fact, let’s try it again.

Abraham Lincoln

George Washington

John Jay

Alexander Hamilton

James Madison

Thomas Jefferson

Henry Ford

Orville Wright

Wilbur Wright

Franklin Roosevelt

I’m sure I’ll be taking another crack at this.

In fact, let’s go again right now.

George Washington

Jonathan Edwards

Thomas Edison

William F. Buckley, Jr.

Ernest Hemingway

Louis Armstrong

Dwight Eisenhower

Walter Cronkite

Nathaniel Hawthorne

As you can see, my entries are not by any means all people I personally think are cool  Cronkite, for example, makes it because he used the Tet Offensive in january 1968 - which was decidedly not a success for the Viet Cong - to convince the American public that U.S. involvement was a quagmire, which set off real momentum for the antiwar sentiment in this country, something that continues to mess us up to this day.   John Dewey’s educational theories started us down the path of learner-centered education which paved the way for our present preoccupation with self-esteem.

The comment thread for the post below, on Baghdad’s New Year celebration somehow morphed, as BN threads often do, into a debate about the aboriginal peoples who populated the Americas prior to the arrival of the Europeans, and their interaction with those Europeans.  I’m going to let this Michael Medved Townhall column from last September, “Reject the Lie of White Genocide Against Native Americans,” be the definitive BN word on the subject.

A Western Civilization Studies department struggles to be born at - ready for this? - the University of Colorado at Boulder, but is likely stillborn due to - are you ready for this - the obstruction of a couple of Republicans.  What’s up with this disingenuous questioning: “Just what is Western civilization?”

Chime in on the big question Don Quixote poses over at Bookworm Room.

It was most interesting to come upon this Myron Magnet piece in City Journal after my four days at Indiana Black Expo.  Magnet is one of the most rigourous and clear-eyed observers of the upheavals in American society in the last fifty years, and here he applies that scrutiny to the question of why we have the simultaneous phenomena of an expanding black middle class and a huge black prison population.  It’s long, but I invite anyone who starts into it to read the whole thing before drawing any conclusions.  And if anyone feels the need to get the same message from someone of another pigmentation, may I suggest the works of John McWhorter or Shelby Steele.

Leaders going wobbly seem to abound these days - think the UK’s new prime minister Brown, the USA’s W, and Israel’s Olmert.  Pakistan’s Musharraf has definitely joined their ranks.

You may have already seen this.  It’s showing up all over the web.  I say it can’t appear in too many places.  From 1992, Senator Albert Gore excoriating the Reagan and Bush I administrations for not recognizing the threat - as in terrorism support and use and pursuit of WMDs - posed by the “monster” Sadddam Hussein of Iraq.