Month: December 2010
Republican Christmas
Posted on December 19, 2010 in Class Compassion Scoundrels
If Christ was born among us today and they got wind of it, the Republicans would be at the manger to brand Him deny the validity of his birth certificate.
Glenn Beck’s Big Government Claims a Victim
Posted on December 16, 2010 in Equality Liberals & Progressives Violence
There are only a few steps from the righteous rage of the Left and Mr. Duke.
Rude and Barbaric
Posted on December 15, 2010 in Culture Wars Hatred Propaganda
Many of us are paralyzed into non-thinking when someone invokes “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion” as the reason why they believe as they do. When you translate this, it means “I can say what I want and you can’t criticize it.” It’s a common rejoinder from the Right — especially racists — and from extremist believers aka Fundamentalists among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. When the American public buys into this, it leads us to a place where only the corrupt and vile can speak.
The First Amendment was never meant to operate so. And I think free speech is closer to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about ethics: ethics aren’t there to excuse what we do but to make us reach for something better. When we let the racist or the fundamentalist go unchallenged because “it’s his opinion and he can think what he wants” we let society down. We allow it to fester in fraudulency and evil. It is our duty to say to people who voice ugliness that they are ugly. We have these rights to make a better America, a better world. And part of that means using our voices to confront wrong.
If a Muslim cleric says apostates must be executed, we have a right to say “Well, that is just barbaric.” If a skinhead says he has a right to hate foreigners, we have a right to say “That is backwards and bad.” They scream that it is their free speech right, but they cannot silence us with their insistences that they can say anything — and do anything — they want without us challenging them because of free speech. That alone deserves admonishment. They live in America and they cannot put a stopper on their fellow citizens.
They are rude and barbaric. And I think they realize it, but don’t want to admit it.
Obama’s Blunder
Posted on December 7, 2010 in Accountability Campaign 2010 Class
My only question is “Jerry Brown? Won’t you run?
Twain, Gould, and Mammonism; Strickland
Posted on December 2, 2010 in Accountability Class Reading
I’m deep in Mark Twain’s Autobiography, a curious document which consists of his dictated remembrances, newspaper clippings, and a biography written by his second child, Susy. It does not follow any sort of neat line, but jumps about like a carnival ride landing here in his lecture circuit days, there in his boyhood, and here in his opinions of the current day. One passage that I have just read speaks to our time:
Jay Gould had just then reversed the commercial morals of the United States. He put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come. Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it. They had respected men of means before his day, but along with this respect was joined the respect due to the character and industry which had accumulated it. But Jay Gould taught the entire nation to make a god of money and the man, no matter how the money might have been acquired. In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money or of its possessor, in our region. And in our region no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired his money by shady methods.
The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is “Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get ir dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.”
How true! A new American feudalism arises before our eyes and it has bought the traditional check against its progress, the media. Ted Strickland, who was recently narrowly defeated as Ohio’s governor, thinks part of the problem is that the Democrats have failed to speak about these conditions in language which voters understand.
Instead of embracing populism, they have retreated into intellectual elitism.
Strickland says:
“I think it has to do with a sort of intellectual elitism that considers that kind of talk is somehow lacking in sophistication. I’m not sure where it comes from. But I think it’s there. There’s an unwillingness to draw a line in the sand.”
This intellectual elitist concurs with Strickland’s assessment. As the governor asks “How many times do you have to be, you know, slapped in the face?”
It’s class warfare and my class needs better generals.
The Fall of America
Posted on December 1, 2010 in Civic Responsibility Disasters
Mark me a true patriot.
