Culture – Page 34 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

March 27, 2020March 27, 2020

The Real Risk Factors

Mark Twain popularized this phrase of unknown origin: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Much of the talk about the pandemic is proving him right. CNN reports that the US has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world at 82,000. Such isn’t all that surprising since we are the home of top-flight and broad-based health care and research. We are rich and capable enough to uncover the instances. I’m sure that CNN meant this to be an indictment of Trump, but it should be less surprising given our capabilities.

The above isn’t the only instance of our media making a muddle of our public discussions. Take for example the talk about “risk factors”. Yes, there are genuine physical risk factors such as age and the notorious “underlying conditions”. Completely left out, though, are the social risk factors. Just look at a map to see what I mean.

The areas most vulnerable are fronting onto the global economy, with globalized populations (“diverse” in today’s woke parlance), and with a critical mass of compacted dwellers. In addition, these places are politically captured by the cultural and political Left. So, they are ripe for infection due to the pipeline for pathogens from tourism and the to-and-from travel of residents with foreign relatives. Many of these cities are ports to boot. The governing personalities are enthralled with the mistaken notion of the bigger the government, the better — an idea born to disappoint. Need I say more?

So, what are we to make of this after-the-fact finger pointing? Not much. Neither Trump nor de Blasio is to blame. These things are black swan events with very little warning, especially if the country of origin is an even bigger-government state with every reason to hide the truth. We could bankrupt the country in the futile effort to prepare for unknown unknowns, to borrow a bit from Donald Rumsfeld.

Then, what are we to do? Get back to work, except for the intensely infected cities and a few other areas. The one-size-fits-all approach to public policy is ridiculous. The places most affected need to be treated differently. Lockdown and quarantine them. Everywhere else should carry on … and be leery of migrants from de Blasio’s Eden.

RogerG

March 16, 2020March 16, 2020

Panic in the Age of Trump

Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., paper goods isle on Sunday, 5/15/2020.

The photo (above) is of the paper goods isle of Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., on Sunday, 3/15/2020. A young mother with a couple of kids in tow had 2 30-roll bricks of toilet paper in her cart, the only tp that I saw in the entire store. Is this what modern-America panic looks like?

Shoppers at BJ’s Wholesale Club market at the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, N.Y., March 14, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

On that same day, we rolled into a gas-‘n-stop for fuel and corn nuts. A fellow customer waiting in line mentioned a wild rumor on social media that Trump is considering the closing of the interstates. Panic, once again, in the age of Trump?

Our eyes and ears are saturated with “pandemic” and doctors on tv with warnings galore. Social interaction has become a dirty word. It’s “coronavirus this” and “coronavirus that” everywhere we look. Is America starting to resemble in thought and deed the America of the 1938 radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles?

Are we, modern sophisticates, really so “above that”? I doubt it in the age of Trump. Trumpophobes see all external stimuli with real or imagined evil intent as emanating from Trump. “Trump’s Katrina” is bandied about in the same manner as “abortion” and “control of her body” comes off the lips of Madonna.

Maybe what’s at work is something I call “vortex thinking”. Most everything of consequence today goes down two vortices: Trump and climate change. The Polar Vortex of a few years back, with its bone-chilling temps, was blamed on … global warming. A tornado that passes through your backyard is pinned on … global warming. Etc., etc. Regarding Trump, anything that’s bad in your life is due to … Trump. Everything that’s bad to anyone at any given time is placed at the feet of Trump.

George Will – no fan of Trump by any means – calls the phenomena “Caesaropapism”. Our presidents are now accorded demigod status. They are expected to control the tides in the manner of Persian king Xerxes flogging the Hellespont for destroying his pontoon bridge in the advance of his invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

Xerxes’s soldiers flogging the Hellespont.

Depending on the group of boosters, a president is saintly or evil incarnate. He or she is expected to be a master marionette controlling the actions of 330 million individuals. Does “sophistication” now mean thinking like a 5-year-old? Apparently so.

Right now, we are experiencing the first natural disaster to be pinned on the next-Republican-president-in-line. Bush 41 was pasted with the rather mild recession of 1991-1992. Bush 43 had his hurricane. Trump’s is COVID-19.

What separates a hurricane and a virus from an economic downturn is the fact that recessions are, indeed, man-caused. They may occur due to a constellation of actions that were taken earlier in a president’s term, or, more likely, they erupt from the gestation of factors unleashed long before he took the oath. Ditto for the good economic times. For instance, back in 2008-9, the bills came due after many years of easy money and political pressures to extend mortgages to financially insecure people. Obama rode it to the presidency. Ironically, his wing of the Dem Party had a big role in setting up the dominoes.

Now we have the coronavirus. Yeah, it’s unique … like all the previous strains were unique. Sure, take all the practical mitigations available but remember, this thing, like the earlier ones, will have to run its course. We have one thing going for us: we aren’t the Athens of 480 BC, or Constantinople of 541-542, or Europe of the mid-14th century.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, 1562, is a famous painting that relates to the Black Death of the 1340’s.

Please, get some perspective … and stop hoarding the toilet paper!

RogerG

March 7, 2020March 7, 2020

Today’s Recommendation, a Documentary: “One Child Nation”

Showing on Amazon Prime is “One Child Nation”, a deeply disturbing excursion into the cruelties of Communist Chinese social engineering. Social engineering is the sine qua non of communism. An allegedly wise cadre of elite apparatchiks sit on top of a society and pronounce from the summit measures to bring about the better world, as they are totally uncaring and devoid of understanding of the unintended consequences. And for Communist China, the one-child policy is replete with state-manufactured horrors.

Don’t expect the host/narrator to endorse the pro-life position, though. She doesn’t, in a rather befuddling way. She equates in a perfunctory fashion the grotesqueries of the Communist policy with US and our state governments’ actions to restrict abortion. Both are nonsensically lumped together in her mind as government attempts to “control a woman’s body”. Don’t let that dissuade you from seeing the film if you are pro-life. There’s enough in it to soil the entire concept of abortion and the social engineering endemic to an assumed omni-competent state, the kind that would be erected by Bernie or Joe. The two differ only in scale.

From 1979 to 2015, the CCP enforced a 1.0 birth rate on the whole country. It was barbarous both in its implementation and results. In 2015, the potentates pulled another number out of their hat: 2.0.

Abortion weighs heavy in the story, along with forced sterilizations, the killing of babies who survived the procedure, and the lingering psychological scars from participation in the campaign. The malefactors even received awards for their “service”. One Chinese artist in the 1990’s was shocked into opposition when he discovered fetuses (or babies, depending on your preference) in yellow and green plastic bags marked with “Medical Waste” in garbage dumps and landfills.

The Chinese artist who discovered aborted fetuses in yellow bags in landfills. Also pictured are fetuses that he collected, suspended in formalin.

The demography of China became tilted toward males as the females were aborted or abandoned to die, all due to a Chinese cultural bias in favor of the males. Older people many years later were in tears reminiscing on leaving a baby in a box alone in the countryside or street, fearful of the repercussions for exceeding the quota. Abandonment supplied the wherewithal for an new international adoption industry, much of the proceeds lining the pockets of government apparatchiks. What happens when an entire population of over a billion is so emotionally scarred?

Like it or not, the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the legitimacy of abortion very skillfully. If Sen. Charles Schumer had seen the flick, he might not had been so enthusiastic in his threats to a couple of pro-life-leaning jurists. What he and, ironically, the film’s host ignore is the first question at root in the dispute: Is the entity in the womb (and all of us were an “entity in the womb”) a human being? If “yes”, euthanizing a prenatal baby is an act of killing. No amount of a person’s “control of their body” can atone for the immorality. If “no”, the fetus is the equivalent of a tumor. The Chinese artist puts the “no” position in an awkward spot when he displays dead pre-natal babies suspended in jars of formalin. They look like my two sons at their birth; only these are dead.

Sen. Charles Schumer at pro-choice rally outside the Supreme Court , March 4, 2020.

See the film, but ignore the self-contradictory commentary at a short juncture at the end. Whether forced or not, the flick puts abortion in a bad light. If you’re pro-choice, abortion shouldn’t be construed as a sacrament, as some hard-core activists screeched outside the Supreme Court. Whether it’s legal or not, it’s still a horrible thing. No mistake about it.

RogerG

March 2, 2020March 2, 2020

Frighteningly Familiar

Today’s movie recommendation: “The Rope” by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, starring James Stewart. Two well-to-do young men, fresh from their elite colleges, both considered smart with above average IQ’s, committed a murder because they thought themselves to be above morality. Hitchcock probably got the idea from a famous 1924 murder case. The script and the reality are eerily similar.

A scene from the movie with the James Stewart character between the killers.

The reality: On May 21, 1924, Richard Loeb (age 19) and Nathan Leopold (age 20) planned and executed the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks as he as walking home from school. Loeb, the son of a millionaire Sears and Roebuck executive, and Leopold, the son of a millionaire founder of a box manufacturing company, would be legitimate Mensa Society members. Leopold was a scholar of botany and ornithology, mastered 10 languages, and translated classics from their original Greek and Latin. Loeb was the youngest graduate, at age 17, of the University of Michigan in 1921. They would reunite in a couple of years for their ultimate and horrifying stick-it-to-the-man caper.

Nathan Leopold (l) and Richard Loeb at their trial. Their kinship for each other developed into a sexual relationship.

Bobby Franks, age 14, shortly before his murder.

Both were fascinated with the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, in an extremely garbled fashion. They were attracted to Nietzsche’s notion of the rise of “supermen” after he predicted the fall of traditional institutions and norms, an idea that resonated with both National Socialists and the Bolsheviks: Lenin had his “vanguard elite” and Hitler his Aryan supermen.

It wouldn’t stop there. An emphasis on an elite of “smart” people with the appropriate college credentials would be a keystone of late 19th-century Progressivism. Progressives valued an unelected class of administrators and regulators – a technocratic elite – to govern society. The conceit is still with us in our expansive administrative state, and as Democrats parade about with their constant use of the term “expert” to nullify opposing views. Their proposals – The Green New Deal for instance – would fast-track the ongoing trend of transferring great power to their preferred class of elite college-credentialed overlords in ever-expanding agencies.

Have we been softened-up to accept this state of affairs? As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I think so. In the movie, a prominent teacher (James Stewart) is presented as a powerful influence on the minds of the killers, until the teacher discovers too late the wayward extent that they took his classroom musings. The earlier pride in his clever mental gymnastics in the classroom is wiped off his face as he discovers the body later in the story. Then he comes to realize his huge mistake.

A similar corruption of the mind was noticed by CS Lewis in his famous tract “The Abolition of Man”. Lewis worried about the dehumanization of young minds occurring in British classrooms of the mid-20th century. In a chapter titled “Men Without Chests”, he wrote of the degradation of rampant subjectivism and relativism in English instruction. Out goes firm standards of good and evil, in comes the unrestrained individual.

Progressivism performs a similar trick. Essential to their understanding is a denigration of the past as corrupt while the present is an improvement on the way to a better world. There’s not much veneration for the old and true. No wonder church attendance is down. Our schools and culture are depressing it.

How about some serious thought of what we are doing to ourselves? Watch the movie.

More on the Leopold and Loeb murder case here.

RogerG

February 28, 2020

The Decline of Memory and Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders, Oct. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

In our times, 5 decades is too long. Our historical memory seems to not last beyond one decade. What have our families, institutions, and schools done to us? One possible cause for the memory loss is a kind of imperialism of the present: an unexamined assumption that the past is a lesser, corrupted life and the present is all that counts. The lack of memory exaggerates the present and puts us in a position to repeat past mistakes, not realizing them as mistakes. Thus, to no surprise, we are seeing a rekindling of socialism and the rise of Bernie Sanders – a Super Tuesday and general election away from the White House.

The fabled 60’s counterculture gave birth to a willful forgetfulness of the past. The tenor of the times was captured in one of my favorite songs, “Let’s Live for Today” by the Grassroots. Great song, horrible philosophy. Here’s a good rendition:

The song came to mind as I was reading about Reagan’s strangulation of the USSR that would lead to its ultimate demise. He instituted steps to shrink hard currency (the stable currencies like the pound sterling and US dollar) to the monstrous behemoth. He lifted the price controls on our own crude oil production (imposed by Carter). The price controls led to a shuttering, for instance, of the oil fields around Bakersfield, where I lived, and across the country. Bernie promises to relive the disaster that was the malaise of the 70’s.

Man begging in Moscow in the 1980’s. Looks like a homeless encampment in one of our Democrat-run metropolises.

The price controls destroyed our own production, increased our dependency on foreign sources, and created shortages and inflated prices at the pump. Bernie wants to leap beyond Carter and reregulate the economy while imposing huge tax hikes on it, as well as bring Soviet central planning in the form of The Green New Deal to America. What Carter did to the US oil industry and the Soviet Union did to its people, Bernie wants to do to us.

Now, the Dems in Sacramento want to accelerate Bernie’s version of eco-terrorism – The Green New Deal – by “managing the decline of the oil industry” in the state. This isn’t about “price controls”. It’s about economic euthanasia. Wow be to those in the oil-producing regions of the state. No amount of utopian retraining will replace the loss.

Kern River oilfield outside Bakersfield, Ca.

I put the blame for the rise of Sanders and the crazy left in Sacramento squarely at the feet of pop culture’s corruption of our schools, families, and institutions — a present from the Summer of Love. It’s a form of engineered social amnesia. Are we about to institutionalize calamity because we have the memory of a hormone-addled teenager?

Drug-infused ecstasy during the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, 1967.

RogerG

February 21, 2020February 23, 2020

Sadly, Remembering Parkland, 2/14/2018

People distant from an event have a tendency to nationalize it. The occurrence is shoe-horned into some broader issue, or, better yet for activists, a politically opportune crisis. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman High School would descend into the gutter of national gun-control politics. The most impactful circumstances surrounding the shooter are glazed over in the pursuit of a hot-button issue. Useful lessons are avoided as the coffers fill with contributions from any number of frightened citizens and well-heeled political exploiters (Michael Bloomberg, et al).

The most relevant facts, though, are those that directly relate to the cultprit. Right there, we find a convoluted and perplexing school discipline policy – the Promise program – in the school district, all meant to dilute the reality of bad behavior in the classroom, no matter the violator’s background. The result is a discipline system that few can understand, including the miscreant. The old rule of investing applies: if you don’t understand it, don’t do it.

The second factor to come out of the horrid affair is the insipid reactions of our public employees up and down the federal system. Take district superintendent Runcie and his use of gross and misleading numbers to defend his discipline system that in reality can’t and won’t remove real threats. Disgusting. Or the behavior of local law enforcement to refuse to enter the building to stop the shooter. Or the school’s security personnel who saw the guy coming and did nothing to stop him. Appalling. Or the warnings coming from citizens over a number of years to authorities about the shooter’s disturbing behavior. Warnings were plenty, and unheeded.

This only proves that real public safety begins with personal responsibility of the individual citizen. That’s the reason for the Second Amendment. Gun-free zones are in practice safe zones for killers.

Crass language would refer to the Parkland incident as one huge government “cluster #$&?@”. Either way you cut it, it was an entirely avoidable disaster … if government worked as designed in its flow chart. Fact is, it seldom does.

Instead, we get the parade of demagogues who promise a more centralized and bureaucratized version of the same. A good place to find them was on the stage Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas.

The lineup of demagogues in Las Vegas, Feb. 19, 2020.

Are We Irreconcilably Divided as a Nation?

Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute says “yes”. In a presentation before an audience at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, Caldwell lays out his diagnosis of our current rupture. It’s an argument worth serious consideration.

In a nutshell, Caldwell sees the country split into winners and losers, purported villains and heroes, and the much-abused oppressed and oppressor. I attribute it to Marxist theory seeping into the schools, media of almost any type, and the broader culture. Caldwell views it as a byproduct of the extension of our civil rights crusade beyond any prudent limit. He asserts that it created a second constitution – a subversion of the original one. The second and unratified constitution created law by bureaucratic and judicial decree, and began to short-circuit popular sovereignty. Then, all began to notice that they were, without approval, placed into the categories of winners and losers, villains and heroes, and the oppressed and oppressors.

For me, the Marxist paradigm entered the social bloodstream from the cultural commanding heights of our urban centers. It’s there that we find it lavishly evident in our faculty lounges, urban political machines, media headquarters, and even the corporate boardroom. Thus, the much talked-about blue/red divide.

Caldwell, though, has a point. He illustrates how a noble cause – civil rights, equal protection, etc. – can fall down the rabbit hole of malign governance. Please read the speech in the latest edition of Imprimis.

RogerG

February 16, 2020February 16, 2020

McCabe’s Non-prosecution and DC

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in Washington, U.S., June 7, 2017. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

If what your enemies say about you can amount to a claim of credibility, then Andrew C. McCarthy passes the test. He’s been lambasted by the Dem-Left as a hack and Trumpkins as a partisan of the “deep state”. They are both wrong. As a seasoned US attorney, he tries to objectively see the subject from many angles. When looking at the McCabe case, his analysis may not be dispositive but it lacks the hyperbole often found on MSNBC and the Trump-o-philes on Fox News. In McCarthys’ rendering, as I discern it, the McCabe case stinks of DC.

The DOJ’s decision not to pursue prosecution of McCabe has 3 factors swirling about. First, it’s hard to convict when star witnesses for the prosecution (like Lisa Page) are twisting testimony to the advantage of the defense.

Second, Trump smears the criminal justice process with his Tweet-rants. It’s hard to convict when all involved are continually exposed to announcements from the White House that the defendant is a “liar”, etc. The president as the ultimate chief prosecutor is mucking up the constitutional right to a fair trial. He has a “right” to free speech, as Hannity is wont of saying, but his “right” clashes with the “rights” of others. If Trump was a prosecutor – which he is as chief executive – he’d be sanctioned by the court. And he does this in DC, a place already with a deep and popular disdain for him and Republicans in general.

That leads me, finally, to the messy matter of a forever-tainted jury pool in DC. Overwhelmingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment are so deeply embedded in the DC population that Democrats are more-likely-than-not to skate. The story of the jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial is a good case in point. For prosecutors of any Obama associate, they’d have to get beyond jury selection from a broad Resistance demography. It’d be like getting a conviction in a lynching case in the Deep South after Reconstruction. Currently in DC, a prominent Republican in the dock would get a hang ’em jury and a Democrat would have the advantage of jury nullification (a blanket refusal to convict). In DC, just remove the blindfold from the statue of the lady of justice.

All the more reason to strip DC of many of its administrative functions. Ship them out to environs less congenial. Pick a Midwestern state. Otherwise, we’ll be saddled with an unhinged and Democrat-dominated federal government for as far as the eye can see. Elections, all of a sudden, become less important. Were they ever, at least since FDR?

RogerG

February 15, 2020February 15, 2020

Today’s Recommendation: ESPN’s “30 for 30: Michael Vick”

Much has been made of the urban/rural divide in America. It’s real and shows in many ways. The reactions in the Michael Vick dogfighting case are emblematic of the split. Federal prosecutors, the press (mostly urban), and urbanites emitted a profound revulsion. Most of Vick’s neighbors may have disapproved – or not – but didn’t see it as the equivalent of serial capital rape.

The local DA decided not to charge, reflecting in a sense the values of his hometown. The principle of subsidiarity (overwhelmingly most government should be local) is an unstated truth in our governmental system, and active here.

The immense publicity and concomitant mostly urban outrage stepped up the case to a more distant level: the feds. For city slickers (of which I’d have to include myself), anything is justified to get the abuser of the counterpart of the beloved family pet. The prosecutors, appropriately pedigreed in universities and suburban upbringings, turned the immense powers of the federal government on Vick. He went from shame and no charges to two years in a federal lockup. His life’s preparation and career were emasculated.

Michael Vick leaves federal prison in 2009 to serve the last few months of his sentence in home confinement.

Cock and dogfighting, and animal abuse in general, should be criminalized. No doubt. But this is a case of proportionality. For suburbanites, their personal exposure to animals is limited to Fido. For many childless adults – of which there are increasing numbers in our cities – Fido is a surrogate son or daughter to shower all their love and wealth. They’d sooner see Vick drawn and quartered. For Vick’s neighbors, it’s yawner.

The drawing and quartering of François Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV of France, 1610.

For me, a conviction, fine, probation, and all the bad publicity and shame that he heaped upon himself would be sufficient. For sheltered suburbanites, who would consider a lesson on Lewis and Clark’s eating of their dogs and horses to survive the Rockies to be akin to the distribution of child pornography, nothing short of waterboarding and a decade in Supermax would do.

Michael Vick recounts his journey to a restored faith to students at Liberty University on Jan. 29, 2018.

See the 2-part program. You can get it on ESPN’s “On Demand”.

RogerG

February 8, 2020February 8, 2020

All Those Years Ago

John Lennon and George Harrison in the heady days of the Beatles.

While listening to Pandora during my exercise routine, I was reacquainted with a much-loved tune by George Harrison, “All Those Years Ago”. It is a tribute to John Lennon. My mind turned to the symbiotic relationship between words and music. A lovely tune can make words have a strong pull on our sentiments and carry with them the ring of truth. Words standing alone can be easily rejected, but wrap them up in music and they can seem like the siren call of the angels. Yet, are they? I think not.

George Harrison and John Lennon of The Beatles talking to the press and media at Bangor following the news of the death of their manager Brian Epstein, 27th August 1967. (Photo by Stephen Shakeshaft/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

With deep sincerity, Harrison turns Lennon into something of a wise prophet when he refers to two of Lennon’s songs: “Imagine” and “All You Need Is Love”. Harrison recalls that others saw his friend as “so weird”. Yes, Lennon was caricatured as “weird”, and in a sense he was. I don’t mean in the literal meaning of the word. Lennon absorbed an emerging ethos of the 60’s that the world’s problems could be cured with “love”. Now that’s weird, and categorically wrong. Separating “love” from God and espousing a sterile and secularized form of it, as Lennon does in “Imagine”, leaves us with a longing for a vacuous impossibility: the universal embrace of a love-without-God. It’s self-defeating and ignores the reality of ourselves and our experience.

From the June 25, 1967 One World broadcast of “All You Need is Love.”

I fully empathize with Harrison’s purpose in his striving to fondly remember his dear friend, but his dear friend came to symbolize in the public imagination much that was wrong with the counter-culture and peace movement. We are still living with the consequences in our drug epidemics, a promiscuity that has emasculated the family, and a self-centeredness that has brought many to ruin.

Opioid addict. “Getting high” became therapeutic in the 1960’s. The falsehood entered the social mainstream in a big way after the 1960’s.

Oh well, enjoy the tune. Ironically, I find it to be one of Harrison’s best.

Here are the lyrics, if you’re interested:

I’m shouting all about love
While they treated you like a dog
When you were the one who had made it so clear
All those years ago

I’m talking all about how to give
They don’t act with much honesty
But you point the way to the truth when you say
“All you need is love”

Living with good and bad
I always looked up to you
Now we’re left cold and sad
By someone, the devil’s best friend
Someone who offended all

We’re living in a bad dream
They’ve forgotten all about mankind
And you were the one they backed up to the wall
All those years ago
You were the one who imagined it all
All those years ago.

Deep in the darkest night
I send out a prayer to you
Now in the world of light
Where the spirit free of lies
And all else that we despised

They’ve forgotten all about God
He’s the only reason we exist
Yet you were the one that they said was so weird
All those years ago
You said it all though not many had ears
All those years ago
You had control of our smiles and our tears
All those years ago.

All those years ago …
All those years ago …
All those years ago …

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: George Harrison
All Those Years Ago lyrics © Sm Publishing (poland) Sp. Z O.o., Umlaut Corporation (ascap)

RogerG