The Woodstock Music Festival, August 1969Woodstock, the scene after it ended.
The golden anniversary (50 years) of Woodstock is winding down, and with it, hopefully, the end of the glamorization of the wild bacchanalia. The thing has been raised to the status of near-religious icon. I must admit that I’m in a mood for a little iconoclasm similar to Byzantine plebes and peasants smashing icons in the 8th century AD. Woodstock doesn’t deserve anything “golden”.
Let me take that back. Some of the music was great. But let’s be honest, Woodstock and its aftermath for a couple of decades was hedonism with a beat. As it would turn out, the only ones to profit were the media moguls and the purveyors of Hep C treatments.
Hashish at Woodstock
For the rest of us, we got a poisoned culture. We’re still trying to live down an epidemic of out-of-wedlock births, drugs as recreation, sex as recreation, a “me” culture, and a rash of self-centered materialists. The cultural ooze swamped civil society with its families, churches, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations. For many, they inhabit a culturally deracinated war zone.
The same rationale that stripped our culture of its moral moorings on Yasgur’s farm also is pushing for government as mommy and comforter-in-chief to pick up the pieces. Besides detonating any concept of fiscal limits, the ultimate result is to freeze us in amber as perpetual adolescents. I sense a return of aristocratic condescension and noblesse oblige without much of an independent middle class. A resurgence of feudalism anyone?
Thanks Woodstock for the great music, but no thanks for the scorched earth culture.
Opioid users in Tennessee. Two of the three have been using since they were young teenagers. Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian
U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris (D, Ca.) in a CNN Town Hall, April 22, 2019. She pledged that, if elected president, she would take executive action to enact sweeping gun control measures.
America is awash in solutions in search of a problem. Climate change is happening to some extent. But is the problem such an obvious cataclysm to justify sovietizing our entire economy and way of life in the Green New Deal? Differences exist in aggregate, average wages between men and women. So, is massive federal, state, and local intrusions into every business’s labor practices down to the minutest detail reasonable? These examples highlight a light year’s worth of space between proposed solution and hypothetical problem, with emphasis on hypothetical.
Well, we’ve taken the nonsense to a whole new level in the recent barking over gun control. Would any of the proposed “solutions” prevent the mass shootings, mass stabbings, and a career criminal and drug dealer placing cops in his crosshairs in north Philadelphia? Solution and problem have gone beyond the distance to Alpha Centauri (4.37 light years). The two are in separate and parallel universes.
Going back to Sandy Hook, the killer lived in a home with guns, shot his mother to death, and then took a ride past a closer but protected high school to an unarmed elementary school. What background check, gun ban, magazine size limitation, or gun buy-back program would have stopped the guy? What about the murderous loons in El Paso and Dayton? Without a paper trail, there’s nothing to check. Really, do you think any sort of gun ban would have stopped them from getting armed to shoot revelers and Walmart shoppers? Ditto for the Las Vegas murderer.
In Orange County, the savage didn’t even need a gun. He was content with a knife.
The suspect in a stabbing and robbery spree in Garden Grove and Santa Ana, August 7, 2019.
And then we have the Philly shooter. The miscreant had already run afoul of half of the gun laws on the books in the city and state, in addition to huge swaths of the rest of the penal code. I suppose that a career of assaults, prison stays, and meth/crack/heroine dealings would have made him sensitive to a ban on a banana clip in his gun. Nooot!!! This is farce chasing buffoonery.
The surrender of the shooting suspect in north Philadelphia, August 14, 2019.
So they chant, “Ban assault weapons”. What is an “assault weapon”? Put that one into law. Go ahead. Ban “semi-automatic”. In so doing, you just criminalized a good portion of the American public – many of the guns not handled by Sylvester Stalone in one of his flicks are semi-automatic. Ban what the thing looks like, like make the pistol grip taboo. Really? Is that the best that you can do? That fact is, a workable definition is as slippery as a frog lathered in Crisco. What the Dems are really trying to do is ban anything that might look like something in a “John Wick” movie.
The whole herd in the Dem presidential field line up in support of the quackery. Just today I heard an interview of one of the “moderates” in the stable, Seth Moulton (D, Mass.). He tried to peddle his service in Afghanistan and Iraq to rationalize his efforts to steal my rights. Seth, I salute your service but I’m not in a mood to surrender my rights to your conscience. You give up your guns; leave mine alone. They’re legal and I’m clean.
Today’s political circus mangles solutions and problems, and any relationship between the two. It’s a burlesque show; it’s a mess. It’s the political equivalent of speaking in tongues and snake handling. The truth of the matter is that power-hungry politicos, already inclined to make us subservient to mommy and daddy government, want to build a political career on the corpse of our rights – legal, Constitutional, and natural. It’s all about manufactured solutions at the service of political careers. Now that’s the very definition of disgraceful.
Why are we experiencing mass shootings and a spike in suicides, up 30% since 1999? I can’t help but wonder that a deep dissatisfaction is running like an undertow in our times. Are we quickly approaching a dystopia rather than a utopia? If so, our modern life has undermined a key tenet of progressivism. No longer can it be said that life is getting better, also known as “progress”. In some ways, our times may be beginning to stink up the place.
Why the decline? Well, something called solipsism has taken the place of knowledge of our past and a grounding in our civilization. Solipsism is the philosophical core of radical individualism. All reality is interpreted through the individual. Subjectivism runs rampant, and any notion of moderation and objective standards takes a back seat. We are encouraged to have no historical and social understanding and are free to create our own “truth”, not unusual among the fringe who are intertwined in cloistered social media hubs. All-too-often, it is the alienated tutoring the alienated.
How did we get so atomized? How did solipsism take root? Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of our media and schools. Both spread the secular gospel. Radical individualism is hard to avoid in the movies and tv, but it’s reinforced by the schools. C.S. Lewis saw it happening in British schools in the 1950’s. He wrote about it in his book, The Abolition of Man. In a chapter entitled “Men Without Chests”, he reviewed a British textbook teaching literary interpretation:
“I do not mean, of course, that he [the student] will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius [pseudonyms for the authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”
The problem lies in the fact that the student will unknowingly possess assumptions that “will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”
A continuous pounding of the bias will set the stage for a desperate loneliness as we become more unhinged from the roots of family, church, and our cultural inheritance. The social setting is lost, and young people find themselves disconnected in a miasma of their thoughts.
And thus we have Al Qaeda, Nikolas Cruz, the El Paso and Dayton shooters. Are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction?
The El Paso shooter at the Walmart.The Dayton shooter in a bar on the evening of the killings.
“Beto” O’Rourke at the scene of the El Paso shooting.
The two murderous rampages over the weekend are more than evil deeds. They have become, like most everything else, fuel to feed the unrelenting push to, in a modification of Eric Voegelin’s immortal phrase, immanentize progressivism’s eschaton – to bring to life the left’s dream of the better world. It’s like all that happens in the world is forever on the event horizon, ready to fall into the left’s interstellar black hole. Evil deeds can’t just exist to be fought against; they must be recruited for a partisan political agenda. The events’ magnitude and sorrow, therefore, is cheapened by a horde of demagogues.
El Paso after the August 3 shooting.Dayton after the August 4 shooting.
The airwaves are saturated with demagoguery. Fingers are pointing at Trump for super-charged rhetoric. Speaking of super-charged rhetoric, have you attended a Pelosi or Schumer presser, heard the bombast from AOC+3, seen “Beto” before a mike, or been verbally accosted by the rest of the herd running to seize the Democratic Party’s brass ring? If Trump is to blame for El Paso, then Bernie is to blame for the 2017 shooting of Republican congressmen; or the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich are responsible for the Unibomber. Anyone can play this game. And it is a game: something far removed from mature thinking.
The Unibomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, after his arrest, 1996.The 2017 shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders activist.
A favorite of the mob is, you guessed it, “gun control”. Large numbers – 300 million guns in private ownership for instance – are contorted to serve the desired end, which is to make gun ownership as difficult as it is in Maduro’s Venezuela. Their list of banalities includes “universal background checks”, bans on “military guns”, and various forms of gun confiscation. What any of this has to do with straightening out the crooked timber of humanity escapes me. What any of it has to do with addressing the causes of these incidents also escapes causal reasoning. They do, however, serve a political end while advancing certain political careers. In my book, it’s shameful.
The federal government’s powers could be expanded in the manner of Australia and New Zealand and initiate gun confiscation, but still completely miss the point. And the point is the mental isolation of some of today’s young men, typically in the 20-25 age cohort. Could our modern society be a breeding ground for alienated youth? Parental absenteeism in the pursuit of careerism and material wants, or as a consequence of marital breakup and casual amours, have disturbing developmental effects on children. In addition, the buffer of other civil institutions such as neighborhood associations and church aren’t what they used to be. These factors are the ignored elephants in the room as the media chases the demagogues and their rantings. The fact is, a very few of these young people – and some older adults – would be dangerous whether an AR-15, machete, or spoon is available.
Trump-hatred overwhelms all. Could we just stop the hokum and take an adult look at how we are raising the next generation? It could be that all we have to do is draw back the state in order to allow room for civil society to breathe. Yes, and that’s no doubt a tall order in today’s atmosphere of smothering hyperbole.
Church in Boston, Massachusetts @mattbannister via Twenty20
I’m constantly reminded of the general wrong-track numbers in opinion polls even when economic conditions have been improving. Why does there seem to be a nagging sense that things aren’t going well? Two books make a mighty attempt at an answer: “Dignity” by Chris Arnade (a self-described socialist) and “Alienated America” by Tim Carney (commentary editor of the Washington Examiner). Both books elucidate the deep social ills that accompanied the absolute deterioration of civil society in areas frequently referred to as “left behind”. The problem is far, far more than economic. The accompanying review of the books presents the case.
Why the rise of Trump and a resuscitated loony left with a home in the Democratic Party? I’ve heard some Trump supporters call for a government takeover of health care, adopting the nonsense language of turning an economic good or service, governed by scarcity, into a “right”. The loony left is the loony left, always has been, and has an off-the-shelf answer for all that plagues us: big, centralized government; it’s the Progressive way. The two elements have a nexus.
The roots of the current fascination with big, omnipresent government – or looking for saviors in large personalities on the public stage – may be found in the decline of something vital for personal well-being according to Arnade and Carney. Some call it civil society. Others, like Carney, refer to “social capital”. Both recognize the critical role of church, an institution beleaguered by the rising tide of secularization, another by-product of Progressivism. In so doing, the props of connection and support in the vast array of personal social networks have collapsed, leaving behind alienated folks in the vast stretches of the poorer sections of flyover country and young people facing declining opportunities. In our time, the default answer is a savior (Trump, Bernie, the nitwit Squad), vapid sloganeering (“Make America Great Again”, “Structural Racism”, “Make the rich pay their fair share”, “Equal [fill in the blank]”, “There are no illegal immigrants”, and so on), and the elevation of government as a super daddy and mommy. Church and family are replaced by commissars.
I support many of Trump’s initiatives, but he, like Bernie and the nitwit Squad, come to think of it, might be a sign of the times.
One evening I received a call from one of my students in my community college Physical Geography class. He was disappointed in his grade and begged for a higher one. This was his second time around but couldn’t show much improvement. I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience raise his grade as it would be unfair to the other students. He pleaded, “If I don’t get a higher grade, I won’t graduate and I won’t rise to anything in my life.” My heart sank after hearing this. I proceeded to dispel him of the crazy notion. It may be crazy but it is instilled in the young from pre-school on. How did we get to this place?
Somehow, going to college has become our society’s default path to personal advancement. Call it degree inflation. The relentless drumbeat of “college, college, college” has warped public policy with its plethora of taxpayer subsidized financial aid, degraded entry and instructional standards, and produced new “soft science” degree fields that have little bearing on real learning and improved abilities and does much to produce alienated and disgruntled students with a bent for political activism.
Oberlin College students protest a bakery for alleged racism. Later, the college incurred a $44 million judgment for defaming the owners and an employee.
And it fabricates a raft of “disparate impacts”, that old bugbear of civil rights warriors since the 1960’s. College degrees aren’t distributed evenly among social groups, and some groups have protected status in law and court decisions (the Civil Rights Acts and the Griggs decision). As the college degree becomes a de facto test for employment, the brunt will fall disproportionately upon these groups. A new college-industrial complex has taken shape to provide new barriers to job entry and advancement, whose relevance to work performance is more hypothetical than real. The case is laid out beautifully by Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison in National Affairs, “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” (see here).
I suspect that a social bias is at work in this call of “college for all”. Most people making the push come from social strata who predominate in college admissions. It’s how they did it; it’s how their parents did it; it’s how everyone in their well-to-do neighborhood does it. When they get into positions of influence, it’s their preferred prescription for everyone to reach elevated levels of esteem. For them, anything else is for the hoi polloi.
Pres. Obama with daughter Malia, who attends Harvard, and Pres. and Mrs. Clinton with Chelsea who attended Stanford.
Illogic abounds in the process. On the one hand, they complain about the escalating cost of college; on the other, they push as many people as possible into it. It’s as if college advocates want to suspend the relationship between demand and price. You can’t, and when you try, the disjunction will show in other damaging ways.
To put it bluntly, college isn’t for everybody. Nor should it be. Anyway, the heralded thing is debased beyond recognition. Many of our young would be better served if they looked elsewhere for personal growth.
Former deputy Scot Peterson being led away in cuffs.
Scot Peterson is being charged with felony child neglect and 11 other counts. He’s the sheriff’s deputy who was assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He stayed out of the line of fire as staff and students were cut down by a murderous teen.
The lesson is clear. If the leading lights of the Democratic Party have their way, certain legal gun owners of today will find themselves criminals. In the end, after we are disarmed, we may find ourselves one government worker’s emotional disposition away from death.
The Peterson episode illustrates the danger of a disarmed public and the threat posed by dependency on government employees for your simple right to breathe. That’s the promise of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, the bulk of the Democratic Party’s presidential field, and the rest of the party’s shoguns (no pun intended).
Who knew that politics would come to have such threatening implications?
U.S. workers are seen next to heavy machinery while working on a new bollard wall in El Paso, Texas, as seen from the Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez.
Too much heat can destroy things. The same is true of political heat. It wreaks havoc on the language. For instance, take the word “old”, like walls being “old technology”.
I was thinking this morning of the amazing things that we are doing with technology. I bluetoothed my phone with my bedroom radio/receiver for the umpteenth time to listen to Pandora. It’s wonderful to know that we have crammed so much capability in a cellphone smaller than a chest-pocket notepad. In the end, though, the cellphone functions as a radio of days of yore. All the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are just radio signals. It’s “old” in today’s corrupted parlance.
Radio and its signals weren’t understood until a nerdy and inventive kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, figured out how it worked and came up with the components in the 1910’s-1930’s to make AM and FM radio, and television for that matter, possible. Apple and Android are riding on his back.
Armstrong explaining the superregenerative circuit, New York, 1922.
The cellphone has a lot more of “old” in it. Thanks to the gang at Bell Labs and Robert Noyce and his band of lusty fellows at Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1950’s and 1960’s we have the semiconductor and planar process. Without these things, no cellphone … and our kids would be normal.
“Old” is all around us. It seems foolish to call them “old” because they are as fundamental as gravity. It sounds jarring to speak of gravity as “old”. Newton and Einstein didn’t invent gravity. They attempted to understand it. Armstrong didn’t invent the EM spectrum. He just found a way to use it. Bell Labs and Robert Noyce didn’t invent silicon or electricity. They just found ways to use it for sending electrical signals (the integrated circuit).
Noyce and Gordon Moore in front of the Intel SC1 building in Santa Clara in 1970.
“Old” is everywhere. If it wasn’t for another “old” process, we wouldn’t be here … if we escaped the clutches of Planned Parenthood and our parents ignored the loony congresswoman from the Bronx (AOC).
“Old” is one of those words facing disfigurement by our partisan hotheads. Trump wants a wall; the Dems want power. Power to do what? Power to remake America. “Old” is attached to “walls” to frustrate efforts to limit and manage the human tide crashing our borders. Walls do work; ask any celebrity seeking privacy. The Dems, in their heart of hearts, don’t want anything that really works. That’s because they are predisposed to be more comfortable with open borders than they are with controlled borders.
Of course, the Dems need an alternative or surrender the field. Their favorite rejoinder is to attach “more” and “new” to “technology” and “more” to “personnel”. Sounds great, and is. The only problem is that the other side has long wanted this stuff … and walls.
The gambit of only “new technology” and “more personnel”, though, serves the Dems’ interests in two ways. First, the tech stuff can be easily turned off and the personnel moved away from the border if the political winds should blow their way. Secondly, it’s a hot opportunity to funnel some taxpayer cash to their rich donors in Silicon Valley. Construction companies and their workers building a wall aren’t likely to be a rich source of support anyway.
Sometimes such words are combined with others to produce nonsense, as in “diversity” combined with “is our strength”. What football team achieved BCS ranking by allowing the offensive line to be “diverse” in their blocking? It’s balderdash.
Bastardize is defined as “change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements”. “Old” and “diversity” have been bastardized beyond recognition. Simply by affixing “old” to anything has convinced the Dems that they have won the argument. No, they’re just playing fast and loose with the language. Now there’s a scandal, a linguistic one with disastrous consequences.
Alex Cora speaks to the press about the boycott before Monday’s game in Baltimore.
I just learned in “Axios AM” of the Red Sox partial boycott of the traditional White House visit to celebrate their World Series championship. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about Trump, but admittedly even more so with the radical lefty lurch of the Democratic Party. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about organized partisan political acts by athletes. Alex Cora, the manager, and some of the players say that they won’t attend. Well, now I have another team who has muddied itself with partisan politics to avoid. When will this stop?
Of course, Axios couldn’t help but portray the spat in skin color terms … and so do the boycotting players. The poison of reducing moral claims to melanin counts, cultural identities, and ritual assertions of victimhood has penetrated the locker room. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
It’s disgusting. I’m reminded of an audience’s shout to singer James Taylor when he got political: “Shut up and sing!” A parallel?
Mark Zuckerberg in April of 2018 was quoted as saying before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. I would take it further. Any of the deep blue dots on the election map are, by definition, “extremely left-leaning place[s]”.
Today, almost any large institution or organization in our densely-packed urban nodes is likely to be an “extremely left-leaning place”. An example would be our tech giants like Google (or Alphabet, Inc). Daily, we are exposed to the socio-political biases of these “extremely left-leaning place[s]”. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) in Montana was recently confronted with it. (see here)
Google employees at the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
The RMEF had been running ads on Google for years. In April, they were email notified by a Google employee that it would be no more. It seems that Google has a policy against hunting. Somebody apparently did a Google search on the RMEF. The RMEF quickly appealed to the Montana congressional delegation and the rejection was reversed.
Whether Google has a policy in opposition to hunting isn’t the pertinent question. Our gaze should be directed at the Google workroom. What’s happening in there? I suspect, with good reason, that they have an “extremely left-leaning” population at work. To them, nature is a Disney cartoon; hunting is cruelty; and we should all be vegan anyway. Hippie food stores and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation don’t go together.
Just another reminder that urbanity-as-in-citified is synonymous with eco-zealotry, gender fluidity, and Bernie bros/gals.
