Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Joe Klein at Time demonstrates once again his bona fides as a senior member of the effete, chin-rubbing, dismissive, arrogant east coast chattering-class elite.
But take heart. Another Black Conservative smacks him down for his sniff at the CNN poll about the stimulus.
The lamestream media, that is. 56 newspapers worldwide will run the same editorial tomorrow stressing the urgency of the Big Last Chance to Save the Planet getting underway in Copenhagen.
Hide the decline.
In a Washington Examiner essay on the death throes of Newsweek magazine, Noemie Emery perfectly captures the whole aren’t-we-such-chin-rubbingly-judicious-culturally-astute-east-coast-smarty-pants-arbiters-of-what’s-important mindset. By the end of the piece, you are so covered with the odor of that whole CNN/CBS/NBC/NYT/New Yorker/New York Review of Books/Time/New Republic ethos you want to take a shower.
I don’t often take the time to light into poisonously wrong-headed op-eds by effete east-coast America-haters, but occasionally I must chime in. I think the main reason I’m compelled to do so in this instance is that I’m pretty sure my next column for The Republic (the Columbus, Indiana daily newspaper) (deadline at the end of this week) is going to be on the subject of American exceptionalism. That was the subject of film critic / cultural observer Neal Gabler’s column this morning in the Boston Globe.
He makes one of my tasks – avoiding a I-can-match-your-stats-and-figures-on-this-controversy pissing match – easier by establishing at the get-go and at every turn afterward throughout his essay just what his assumptions are. He buys into the global-warming nonsense. He thinks national health care is an obviously desirable thing. He thinks our nation’s intelligence-gatherers have tortured. He bandies the term “affordable”- in the case of this column, in the context of education – as if there’s some objective definition of it. He thinks income equality is some kind of public-policy issue. And then comes the crown jewel of his foul, stinking premise: he sees Americans as “thinned-skinned and arrogant.”
I will take him on regarding what he has to say about immigration. He says that those who – well, I’m going to use my terminology here, not his – understand that America is exceptional point to the number of people who clamor to get here. The example he uses to make his point is Mexicans, and, while there are certainly a lot of them here, legally and illegally, they are far from the only foreign population seeking residency and / or citizenship inside our borders. Consider the growing number of people from India, various Pacific rim countries, Brazilians who come here, get first-rate educations and either start small businesses or make huge contributions to American corporations. He uses the example of Turks emigrating to Germany as his example of an equivalent pehenomenon elsewhere in the world. Well, yes. Germany certainly gets its share of Turks – and far less secular Muslims from far more strident lands. They are not so good at assimilating, Mr. Gabler may have noticed. Also, the United States has a history of people pouring in from various nations – even Germany – going clear back to its birth.
What Gabler doesn’t do is address the actual substance of the claim of exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is not predicated on any kind of prowess or might we have. These are by-products of what makes our country exceptional.
To go over the basics again – something you constantly have to do with leftists, since they make an art out of obscuring the main point of an argument – America is exceptional because it was founded on an idea – in and of itself a novel basis for starting a country in the 1770s – and that idea was that human beings are free because God built it into the nature of our creation. That was powerful stuff. It certainly shook up George III, and Europe generally. (Can you imagine how it blew the minds of rulers and political theorists in Asia, Africa and South America?)
That’s why all those Slavs, Germans, Brits, Poles, Italians, Indians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians, Salvadorans and Kenyans have come to our shores. That’s why they by and large experience a rise in their standard of living beyond their wildest imagining. You can do what you want here. You can create, invent, refine, observe, comment on, organize or just plain draw a paycheck from just about anything you can think of, and, at least so far, no one will stop you.
Oh, and there’s our righteousness, too. DeTouqueville saw that. Americans volunteer, make charitable contributions and get civically involved like no other people on the face of the Earth.
Oh, and what was our Civil War fought over? The notion that no human being ought to own another. That was a first.
Where did the notion that women are fully equal human beings really take hold? That’s right. Here at Uncle Sam’s place.
The likes of Gabler must be refuted as soon as they spout their garbage. Think about where his line of thinking – I use the term loosely – takes us. To a world with no moral compass. To a world in which the likes of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Norway and China – to put together a list culled from the current stars of the United Nations – assume the mantle of leadership. Not a pretty picture.
I say “the likes of Gabler.” He’s not some isolated case. We have someone exuding the same odor strutting into the Oval Office every day.
ADDENDUM: I neglected to address his “government-inspires-people-more-than-people-inspire-government” line. For one thing, it sure is in keeping with his basic contempt for the actual citizens of this country – who, by the way, confer legitimacy on the government at their pleasure. Re: his World War II example: national security is the proper purview of the federal government – in fact, its basic duty. Re: JBJ and civil-rights legislation: he comes awfully close here to insinuating that the majority of Americans were basically racist and / or bigoted right up until 1965, which, if that’s what he’s getting at, is a vicious lie.
The mixed bag that is our current juncture is very mixed indeed. Just as Iraq is looking like a stable, unified country ready to take its place as a player in its region and in the struggle against jihadism, the danger from its neighbor to the east, Iran, looks like it’s reaching critical mass. Domestically, productivity and employment remain high, while bank failures blemish the landscape and inflation, a negligible factor for years, has come roaring back.
America is screaming for clarity and leadership. Or maybe the problem is that it’s not screaming for clarity and leadership,at least en masse in sufficient numbers. There is nothing plaguing us that adherence to the time-honored principles that have paved our way out of every similar past situation wouldn’t cure.
You do see little glimpses of it here and there. Thank God W finally said that we need to drill for oil. If the man who hopes to succeed him as a GOP president can find a graceful way to put his previous pristine-ANWR statements behind him (I guess I am calling for McCain to flip-flop, which isn’t per se a bad thing, if your previous position was stupid) and point out the stark difference between the corporation-bashing of the Freedom-Haters and the overwhelming obvious good sense of turning loose oil companies anywhere it seems likely that there’s oil, he and the congressional candidates of his pary may have a chance.
There are hopeful signs that the public is likewise beginning to see that the core of the banking and mortgage mess is likewise fairly simple: easy credit and shaky responsibility met head-on and shareholders, depositors and taxpayers were left holding the bag. A little of that is sufficient to make the vast majority of timely bill-payers say, “Now hold on, here. Why am I taking a whuppin’ for someone else’s failure to live up to his obligations?”
What I do not understand is this sudden overture the W administration is making to Iran. Sending Under-Secretary of State William Burns to meet with his theocratic counterpart? How does that jibe with the recent stories about W giving Israel an “amber light” to take care of business regarding a nuke program? It may be that there is some highly sensitive factor at play here, some consideration that must be kept tightly under wraps for the time being, but I feel that W owes the American people at least some kind of statement along the lines of “I know this looks like an abrupt turnabout, but if it leads to the favorable changes we anticipate, I will explain it thoroughly in due course.”
Yes, it’s a complicated world. That’s all the more reason to have a consistent set of bedrock principles that guide us as we encounter all manner of wacky twists and turns and some real threats. In a sense, it’s like having a chart in front of you when you’re playing music. If you get lost in the tune, you can’t blame the piece of paper on the stand.
(Who are the other four? What a delicious discussion-thread topic.)
This is a request and not a requirement that these businessmen go, correct? Couldn’t they just tell Ed Markey and his politburo of preening, demagoguing socialists to just go to hell?
And the Freedom Haters not only browbeat the oil guys about prices, but asked them why their companies aren’t investing mre in alternative fuels research.
Here’s why, you stool samples: there’s no profit in it. Our civilization runs on oil. Oil makes possible our advanced, convient, comfortable, secure way of life.
If ever any of BN’s detractors needed a simple example of why the rhetoric occasionally gets a bit purple around here, it’s this kind of thing. There’s no other term for it but Freedom-Hatred.
