Reality comes to our town

Is worse better? We kicked that question around a week or two ago here on this blog, and I've been of the opinion that worsening conditions for white folks don't necessarily lead to a realistic attitude or a rejection of politically correct self-abasement.

We will soon see if worse is better here in my town. Some of my acquaintances are suddenly having their first experience with 'diversity' of any kind, really, and specifically of the Latino variety. Now I'm hearing tales from dismayed townspeople about trash-strewn yards, loud partying, lewd behavior (displayed to the entire shocked neighborhood), and verbal aggression by the immigrants. When I hear about these things, I have to resist strongly the urge to say 'I told you so.' I've been quietly informing people that this is what we may expect as our town Hispanifies.

What do my local friends answer, when I tell them the bad behavior is all too common? Well, it seems that the man who owns the house inhabited by the ill-behaved invaders is himself a fairly recent immigrant from south of the border --- ''but he's so nice!" everyone protests. This is always the problem: the naive whites, who want to think and speak only good things of everyone, will insist on clinging to the belief that the ones who are ''so nice" represent the vast majority, while the rowdies and the chaos-bringers are a few exceptions to the rule.

This is an across-the-board phenomenon when dealing with others, with minorities: the insistence, the desperation to find 'nice' members of the group and to focus on them alone, while wearing blinders in regard to bad behavior by many others.

How do we get past this? It's a real challenge.

Our media and our politically correct Marxist educators have successfully implanted in white people's minds the idea that any problems we encounter, from bad attitudes to violent crime among the minorities, is our fault, our problem, and that it's completely atypical. The 'real' minorities are the ones who are ''so nice'', like those on the ubiquitous TV commercials and in our movies and other entertainment. The real blacks are those nice lady judges and doctors and computer experts and teachers on TV and in movies; those who behave menacingly or belligerently, or who commit crimes against us or our neighbors are 'the exception'.

The 'real' Mexicans are those like the ''so nice'' landlord from Mexico --- who nonetheless allows a group of underclass illegal types to rent a house from him.

The problem is, that even with the exemplary minorities, they usually have friends or family members who are of the less exemplary kind, and they do little or nothing to discourage the bad behavior of their lawless kin and friends. I see a lot of whites desperate to find someone in the minority 'communities' that they can hold up as an example of how 'they are not all bad', and such whites will grasp at straws, hoping to find someone to deliver them from the horrible fate of believing in the negative stereotypes. Many are truly afraid of descending into 'racism', which they perceive either as a kind of mental illness or as moral depravity of the gravest kind. So they grasp at straws; any friendly, decent non-white is proof positive that minorities really are just like you and me, and that race is only skin deep. Many conservatives seem over-eager to find someone to fill the niche for them. For many politically-minded 'conservatives', the role is filled by people like Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, Walter Williams. Or, for the counter-jihadists, it's people like Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, or the other 'good Moslems' or apostate Moslems. ('See? Many of them are on our side!)

Those who are trying to find 'friendly Latinos' have fewer public figures to hold up as examples of Latinos who are on our side.

How many pro-enforcement Mexican-American elected officials are there? There might be one or two somewhere, but none comes to mind. However, for most Americans looking for rescue from their 'racist' thoughts, they can look to, say, the guy who owns their favorite Mexican restaurant. And believe me, every neighborhood has a Mexican restaurant or two these days -- even my town. We have two of them, three, if you count the taco wagon. And everybody thinks the friendly immigrant owner and all the smiling waiters and busboys are proof that mass Mexican immigration is not so bad.

So on it goes. As long as there are two or three friendly faces, or good examples, many Americans will continue to live in a wishful thinking world where it's only the few who cause the problems, and the majority are really our friends -- regardless of the deterioration and the disruption and the chaos and crime they begin to see around them.

I can hope that the real world will intrude into my town just enough to educate my naive 'colorblind' Christian neighbors -- but how much educating, I wonder, will they require? Or will they never learn the lessons of reality? I hope that they will wake up before the whole town is turned into a replica of some border barrio.

Will reality prove more powerful than the stubborn will of many of my neighbors to remain 'open and inclusive'? Or will they continue to believe the fairytales, long after the town is gone to ruin?

Personally, my faith isn't strong enough to convince me that worse will soon turn to better.
I am left wondering how a nation of people who were once fairly hard-headed and savvy have now become such soft-headed, gullible dupes. What happened to us? Can it be reversed? And can it be reversed in time?

Following the truth

Lately over at TakiMag.com, there has been a lot of back-and-forth, mostly involving 'conservatives' showing off politically correct credentials by denouncing 'racism' on the part of other conservatives.

As part of that ongoing series of skirmishes, during an exchange following this post, Christopher Roach raises, in passing, the issue of the reported violence in the Superdome, following Katrina.

In Caleb Stegall's response, he piously denies that such events occurred, dismissing any violence as just run-of-the-mill 'teenage rape', on the one hand, and then questioning whether such attacks really happened. He says they were unsubstantiated, or exaggerated, and of course race is irrelevant.

Now, I don't want to get involved in the name-calling over at TakiMag, but this whole issue of the Superdome violence, and the larger picture of what happened following Katrina, is something that has bothered me since Katrina happened, in August 2005.

I followed the events very closely, being transfixed by the sheer magnitude of the storm and its effects on the area where it hit. I think most of us followed the news over the several days of the crisis there. My interest in the story was also rather personal, since I spent part of my childhood in Louisiana, and I had, at that time, kin in the area affected by Katrina, though not in New Orleans.

When the reports of widespread looting, crime, and general lawlessness started, I was not really surprised. However, as the reports continued and the picture appeared to worsen, with reports of snipers shooting at rescue workers, people in hospitals under attack, and so on, the overall impression of a descent into barbarism was inescapable.

During that time, I was regularly posting articles from the media and blogs on a Republican forum, and I posted a number of rather shocking pieces describing the horrifying scene in the Superdome. At first, these accounts seemed to be considered credible, and the online discussions seemed to accept the veracity of the stories, considering the detail provided. However, gradually some of the major news media began to put out op-ed pieces, questioning whether the worst events described (deaths, gang rapes) actually occurred. The seed of doubt was planted and soon the stories suddenly disappeared or were played down or denied outright.

Strangely, many of the regulars on the Republican message board shortly began to deny that any such atrocities happened in the Superdome, despite the reports we had all read and discussed, and they asserted, irrationally I thought, that the reports were either wild rumor, or lies made up by the liberal media.

Why would the media outright invent the stories? Well, the Bush loyalists asserted that the media, full of insane hatred for the President, made up the atrocity stories ''to make the President look bad.''

I suppose the full-time Bush apologists by this time were rather unhinged by the accusations from the Katrina 'survivors' and their media enablers that the President had "left them there to die". Or the bizarre accusations that the government had blown up the levees in a diabolical attempt to 'finish off' New Orleans and its people. That kind of looniness begat another kind of loony response from the 'right': they denied that the worst reports out of New Orleans were true.

That kind of thing is one example of the bizarre thought processes of many on the Republican side which caused me to flee from that whole group of people. I think the Bush-bashing, which was undeniably real, caused a kind of reverse "Bush-derangement syndrome", in which every bit of bad news from Katrina was alleged to be part of a conspiracy by the Bush-hating left and the liberal media.

Why, I asked, would the media invent these stories out of whole cloth? What would be the motive, other than 'trying to make our President look bad'? This just made little sense to me, not least because it would violate the first commandment of the liberal media: Thou shalt make minorities look good at all times.

Why would the media, even for the sake of "making the President look bad", go to the lengths of using unfavorable stories about revered minorities to do so? The media, even more than they want to discredit Republicans, want to cover up any unflattering stories about minority behavior. Their whole agenda is about fostering an image of a class of people who are above reproach, and shielded from criticism. If that means downplaying certain stories, or of twisting facts to flatter that group of people, they will do so.

But I don't believe for a moment that the liberal/leftist media (many of whom are minorities now, remember) would make up false rumors about savage behavior in the Superdome.

Another reason I didn't doubt the veracity of the stories: there were too many of them, with too many details, and with names. They were not merely 'hearsay' stories, based on unnamed, shadowy sources. There were reports coming out of UK papers, reports via British citizens who had the misfortune to be in the Superdome during the worst of it. There were reports from Australian citizens in similar situations.

There was one memorable piece out of New Orleans, by reporter Brian Thevenot, which provided considerable detail. I cannot find the online versions of these stories, but I saved parts of them. Here is an excerpt from the above-mentioned story:

'Meanwhile, a National Guardsman showed a reporter the many bodies piled up in the New Orleans Convention Center, including in the freezer.

"Don't step in that blood – it's contaminated," Guardsman Mikel Brooks told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. "That one with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man."

Then he shined the light on a smaller human figure under a white sheet next to the elderly man.

"That's a kid," he said. "There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut."

Continued the soldier: "There's an old woman," pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. "I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death," he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.

The Guardsmen stationed at the center say there are between 30 and 40 bodies in the freezer.

"It's not on, but at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.

According to the New Orleans paper, in just one subdivision, Sherwood Forest, survivors who showed up to the Convention Center yesterday said police told them roughly 90 people in the neighborhood had died.

In St. Bernard, 22 bodies were found lashed together. Officials surmised the drowning victims had tried to stay together to keep themselves from being washed away in the storm.''

Was this, and so many other stories which I read, replete with detail and names, all concocted by the media? I just don't believe that.

I know why many refuse to believe it: simple political correctness. They don't want to acknowledge that these things may have actually occurred. Admitting that would have to lead to too many uncomfortable possibilities. It's so much better to play see-no-evil than to face these politically incorrect thoughts.

There is also this story from the BBC, which is here.

And there's more where that came from, although I won't present it here. It isn't necessary. The willful non-believers won't be convinced; they will just insist it's all urban legend -- even though the much-revered though liberal Snopes.com has not disproven these stories.

The whole episode, and the apparent banishing of these accounts down the PC memory hole, should not be tolerated. It's downright Orwellian.

And it's a shame that conservatives should fall prey to political correctness, and don the blinders required by that delusional system.

The truth has to be followed where it leads.

Large families?

Caveat: the following is not meant to disparage anybody who has few or no children. I am speaking in generalities and I trust that nobody will take offense at anything I say here.

In the recent discussion, the question of family size and number of children came up. Now, the most common reason we hear for encouraging large families these days, is the Mark Steyn-esque argument that we need to outbreed the Moslems. I think that's one of the least compelling, and the worst reasons, for having large families. First, can we, who are a dwindling number globally, out-reproduce the teeming Third World? Remember we are far outnumbered, and also keep in mind that this teeming Third World is knocking ever more insistently at our doors and windows. Those who are not already in our midst are on their way or planning to be on their way or trying to find out how they can get here, wishing to be somewhere in the 'rich world', as they call it in The Economist. So hoping to outpace the Third World in reproducing is a far-fetched hope.

There are better reasons for having large families, the best being that we love children and want to welcome as many as we can take care of into our already happy lives. And for Christians, we view kids as God's gift to us, and we want to raise them to know and love and serve and give glory to God.

As members of a large extended family called our nation or people, we want to raise our children to carry on the life of that group, and to continue our ways and our heritage into the future. Our children are the future for our particular line, and for our people.

Who should not have a large family, or perhaps any children? Those who don't want children, who are not prepared financially to care for them, or who are in some way not good candidates.

People should not reproduce carelessly and should not have children by accident.

But apart from all this, what are the advantages of big families?

Over the last 30-35 years, we've seen the triumph of the leftist-feminist idea that large families are harmful to women, who are thereby made nothing but domestic slaves to husband and children. Even many 'conservative' women believe this, and say as much. Once, only leftist feminists said and thought such things; now it's considered common wisdom among 'conservatives', sadly.

The other attitude that has won out since the counterculture days is the 'zero population growth' attitude, that somehow people having large families are irresponsible and backward and selfish, while having few or no children is the sure sign of an enlightened, environmentally responsible person.

Somehow, this ethic is never applied to the Third World peoples, whether they are at home in their native countries or whether they are here in our countries, breeding large families, at public expense.

Another argument that has been widely accepted is that couples cannot afford large families because today's world makes childrearing and stay-at-home mothering out of reach of 'average' people. I say this is not as true as we think; it's all a matter of priorities. It's only economically unfeasible for some people because they choose to spend their resources on pricey toys and gadgets, extensive travel, dining, and many other non-essentials while ruling out the 'expensive' family.

This is very much a 'live for today' attitude, which is at odds with conservatism or tradition.

Today we have much higher standards in terms of what we think is an acceptable standard of living. Many think poverty means having only one car, or living in a modest home rather than a McMansion, or shopping at a lower-price retailer (and I don't mean Wal-Mart) rather than having the trendiest, most up-to-date of everything.

In other words, many of us are spoiled and self-indulgent.
Most of us, myself included, could cut out a lot of the frills and nonessentials and thus have more money for the essentials. In this day of rising gas prices, and tightened budgets, we will probably have to cut out the fat.

But are there real arguments to be made for large families?
I grew up in a fairly large family of five children.

My parents were from large families, of thirteen and eight children, respectively.

Here's what I know from experience and observation about large families:
The children of large families are given more responsibility, usually through necessity, and they have to pull their weight and do their part. This encourages a work ethic and a mature attitude at an earlier age, as well as giving them confidence in what they can do.

They learn the idea of accommodating and getting along with others among a group of siblings.

Kids in a large family are each others' company and entertainment, as well as emotional support. You learn to interact with peers through interacting with your sisters and brothers. Granted, it's not always a bed of roses, but neither is life in the larger world. It teaches you a sense of reality.

"The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness."
- Nancy Mitford

Older children in the family act as role models (in positive ways, and sometimes negative ways).
Older siblings can sometimes be an inspiration either to do good things, or an example to avoid, by bad example. Having younger siblings helps us learn childcare skills and responsibility, which prepare us to be parents in our turn.

Having many siblings tends to teach us not to be as materialistic, because resources are spread rather thinner in large families, and we learn to have regard for others and their wants and needs as well as our own.

Children in larger families have a less exaggerated sense of their own importance; in a larger family you are not going to be doted upon by your parents or grandparents as much as if you were an only child. You thus attain a sense of perspective about yourself and your value. You don't get the idea that the sun rises and sets on you, in a large family. It isn't all about you. There are other people to be considered, and everybody has to take their turn, and learn to wait.

I've noticed that many 'only children' have more trouble relating to peers, or that they tend to be more idiosyncratic, more inclined to be loners. That can be good or bad, but from an outsider's perspective, it seems rather lonely to be an only child. Friends somewhat take the place of siblings, but friends can and do come and go. They are not always there for life, as siblings usually are.

Now I can hear the arguments that 'brothers and sisters aren't always close; many times they can't get along, and even loathe each other.' That's as may be; no doubt it happens, but I don't see that in really well-functioning, loving families much. I didn't see any of that kind of conflict in my Dad's family; the bond between him and his brothers and sisters, and their loyalty to each other, overrode any squabbles they had, which were few.

Blood is, as the old saying has it, thicker than water. Friends can fall out and part ways forever, (and yes, so can family members) but especially with a large family, even if you are estranged from one or two of your siblings, there are plenty of others there for you. Large families present better odds of having supportive, loyal family members who will stick by you.

The same is true of parents and children. My beloved Grandma, with thirteen children and dozens of grandchildren and who knows how many great-grandchildren never lacked for someone to care for her at the end of her life. She did live a long and healthy and active life, and her health failed only at the very end. She was always surrounded by people who loved her as only family members can love.

Of course we can love those who are not kin. But there is a special kind of accepting, enduring, unconditional love that is found among close kin. We can see it also between loving spouses and among certain very close friends, but the family circle is the main source of such love, and after all, it's within the close family unit that we first learn love, acceptance, cooperation, self-sacrifice, and compassion. We also learn patience, and contrariwise, we learn how to stand up for ourselves, if we have contentious siblings.

The family is a microcosm of the larger world out there. It can prepare us to succeed and prosper, given the right conditions. Even a less-than-ideal family can teach us useful lessons.

And surely having large families, with many caring relatives is better for society, especially when seen from a conservative or traditional perspective. In the future, given the prevalence of small families, there will be many, many older people who will rely on nursing home care, and on the ministrations of strangers and the government to help them as they become infirm.

In past eras, when there were large families, siblings shared in the care of the elders when they could no longer take care of themselves, and there was less need for the old folks to be warehoused in nursing homes as they aged and their health failed. Usually, one of the many children could take in the ailing parent and care for them at home.

From a conservative point of view, smaller families and many childless adults will one day mean many frail elderly having to be cared for by the state and by strangers in the relatively near future. If our ideal is smaller government, and a shrinking of the 'nanny state', small families are counterproductive. The presence of strong (and large) family support systems means far less need for entitlement programs and institutions for the elderly.

Likewise, the leftist-feminist agenda has created a need for more day-care centers and has led to a tendency to put toddlers in 'pre-schools' at earlier ages, in the care of the school system.This contrasts to the customs of the past. When I was a child, most of us did not leave our mothers until age six, when we were required to start first grade. Now, at age six, most children are already veterans of the 'system', and fully acculturated to the public school institution.

So the smaller family tends to mean more isolation, early in life and late in life, with the reliance on the rather impersonal institution rather than the loving bosom of the family.

There are many reasons why the left pushed the idea the desirability of few or no children, and of the 'village' raising our children, as opposed to parents and the extended family having control over their children's upbringing. Overall, the agenda has weakened the family and home and the influence thereof, in favor of the influence of the state and debased popular culture.

And speaking of debased popular culture, has anybody noticed how much our popular culture tends to disparage and ridicule the family unit, especially the traditional family? Many sitcoms and movies tend to portray 'dysfunctional' families with obnoxious, boorish parents and malicious siblings. The family is treated very roughly in our entertainment media. I think this is intentional.

People in a society with mostly small families and a weakened family unit are often people with few close ties, people who are rootless and disconnected and more prone to alienation and anomie. They might be possibly more inclined to find 'surrogate families' in weird places, like cults, or political causes, or perhaps simply to remain permanent adolescents, doing adolescent things into middle age or beyond. We often read the standard excuses made by liberal sociologists and journalists about how fatherless kids, (of whom we have many now) or kids with weak family bonds, join gangs, and find their support system there. We are social animals, and people who lack the most primal connections will either tend to find some substitute, or perhaps just become isolated. There does seem to me to be a larger number of isolated, lonely people in today's America, compared to the past.

On WikiAnswers, someone asked about the advantages and disadvantages of a large family.
The only response was this:

If someone decides to have a large family that's their business, however having a large family you better have a good salary or both parents working as the cost of having a large family today is expensive. With a small family the costs are less.''

Is this what it really comes down to, dollars and cents? It isn't possible to count everything in economic terms. Doing so, or even attempting to reduce everything to the naked economic calculations, shows a kind of soullessness that is the unique product of our spiritually impoverished time.

Our parents and grandparents raised families, often large families, in less prosperous times than ours. If they did it, so can those today who want families.

It all comes down to priorities.

“He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.” - Benjamin Franklin

'It's my world...'

''It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

The words above are those of Ratty in the classic story The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame.

In my profile you will read that The Wind in the Willows is one of my favorite books. It was a favorite at our house and it still is, even though I'm far past my childhood.

Blogger Cambria Will Not Yield wrote a piece recently called The River vs. the Open Road, the title of course alluding to the theme of the story, in which the contrast and conflict is between the tried and true, the familiar, the loved, with the 'open road', the constant quest for excitement and variety, embodied in the frenetic character Toad.

Cambria Will Not Yield gives a nice interpretation of this theme in the book, one which I found plausible and fitting: the world in which the main characters dwell can be seen to represent Christian Europe. The 'outer wood' is the larger, non-Western world. In Grahame's story, the weasels and stoats represent that outer wood, and they are brigands who invade the peaceful animals' homes, viewing them as something to plunder. The peaceful Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger and their neighbors must reclaim their homes.

Some have drawn similar analogies with the Tolkien Lord of the Rings series; Middle Earth is England, or Christendom if you like, and the Orcs and their allies are -- well, fill in the blanks with your preferred threat or villain. The parallels are there.

But CWNY quotes this passage from The Wind in the Willows, in which the Rat explains how much the river means to him; it's not just a place. It's his home, his world.

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!”

“The River,” corrected the Rat.

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

Toad’s open-road philosophy leads us to the savage horde barbarism of the stoats and weasels. Ratty’s river leads us back to His Europe.''

One could say (and some would, namely, liberals) that Grahame intended only to write a warm and fuzzy story for children. But the concepts of home, kith and kin, and heritage, including faith, are primal, although it seems the liberals among us do not share our deep regard for those things. The liberals prefer the 'open road', the wider world, because they seem to crave the chaos, the excitement, even the danger represented by the open road. The idea of 'diversity' and openness to all manner of strangers is very much part of the risk-taking preference, the addiction to excitement, even if it is possibly harmful stimulation.

CWNY's post has so much more depth to it, however; I encourage you to read it, especially if you are Christian.

Coincidentally, there is an article in the UK Times which also deals with The Wind in the Willows:

Compared to CWNY's piece, it seems an example of bathos.

Are you a Toad, a Ratty, a Mole? The classic story, 100 years on, is one for today too

The hay fever season brings troubling, breathless dreams; on Sunday I walked too long beside the Thames and fell asleep reading an old favourite. The river and the book and the pollen invaded my dreams and I woke up saying aloud: “That's it! It's all there! We're living it!”

The book was Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, picked up because 2008 is its centenary. The bored bank clerk's pastoral fantasy of the riverbank has inspired others from A.A.Milne to Alan Bennett, Pink Floyd to Kenneth Williams. A hundred years on every line still resonates. All human life is here, all politics, all hope and dread: Mole's divine discontent and timid longings, Toad's hubris, the Wild Wood's threats. The Piper still lures us at the Gates of Dawn and vanishes leaving us bereft; the flawed characters are ourselves, their fears our own.

Politicians are easy to spot. Tony Blair may have fooled us into thinking he was a competent, companionable Ratty, with his gleaming coat and twinkly eyes, but we should have identified him much sooner as Toad. Who, in the first instance, was very likeable: “It's never the wrong time to call on Toad. Early or late he's always the same fellow. Always good-tempered, always glad to see you, always sorry when you go!” He beguiled even the Rat into his canary-coloured cart: “Toad talked big about all he was going to do in the days to come, while stars grew fuller and larger all around them.” When the wheels came off his cart project he went for faster, more dangerous adventures with even worse results: “Always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my, O my!”

Now comes the inevitable liberal sermonizing:

The rest of us -politicians and public - all fall easily enough into the book's great types. Many of us are Ratty, wanting a quiet sociable life messing competently about in whatever serves us as a boat, but too pliable and trusting to resist stronger personalities and their schemes (in the cart adventure, Grahame tells us that Ratty, “still unconvinced in his mind, allowed his good nature to override his personal objections”).

Or else we are Mole, natural camp-followers, enthused by new ideas but then overcome by panicky longings for the familiar, the Dulce Domum. We prefer familiar people, too: in many a region of rapid immigration the dread of the Wild Wood's denizens is echoed daily: “Weasels - and stoats - and foxes - and so on. They're all right in a way,” says Ratty, “- I'm very good friends with them - pass the time of day when we meet, and all that - but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and then - well, you can't really trust them, and that's the fact.”

Was there ever a better, briefer summary of instinctive xenophobia? Unless, of course, it's Ratty's other dictum: “Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World, and that's something that doesn't matter either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either if you've got any sense at all.”

That suspicion of the Wide World endures: Ratty and Mole are the fretful British electorate in times of globalisation, no doubt about it. There is also a worried underclass of rabbits and squirrels, “a mixed lot”, whose main aim is not to lose their homes or be mugged by stoats.

Yet also within the national genome lurks an adventurous streak, and Grahame acknowledges this too in the the seafaring rat who nearly urges Ratty to join him at Fowey: “We shall break out the jib and the foresail, the white houses on the harbour side will glide slowly past us as she gathers steering-way, and the voyage will have begun! As she forges towards the headland she will clothe herself with canvas; and then, once outside, the sounding slap of great green seas as she heels to the wind, pointing South! And you, you will come too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return... take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes!”

Oh, we're all in there. Those singing siren songs to Crewe & Nantwich electors should keep the book by their side. It encapsulates everything: our yearnings, our fears, our contradictory loves of domesticity and adventure, our tendency to follow a romantic Pan or banner-waving Toad, our fear of knife-wielding stoats and weasels, our longing for a dour heavyset Badger to come and sort everything out.''
[emphasis mine]

The writer of the above obviously believes that 'xenophobia', that dishonest label for the natural tendency to prefer one's own and to regard strangers with a prudent wariness, is a bad thing, an inferior sort of reaction, an immoral reaction. Never a sensible or natural tendency.

However, in The Wind in the Willows, the weasels and stoats were a danger; so the 'fretful' 'worried' types were fully justified in their feelings.

Those who remember the book will remember that the four friends, essentially alone, had to drive the marauding stoats, weasels, et al out of Toad Hall, which they had overrun, driving out the rightful inhabitants. But the four friends prevailed, despite being greatly outnumbered.

I suppose in Libby Purves's world, the stoats and the weasels were just looking for a better life, and were misunderstood, and the proper ending would be for selfish Toad to open up Toad Hall to them and 'share' with them in a new multicultural, inclusive, tolerant Wood, where strictly enforced hate crime laws would ensure that everybody got along.

But what do we do, in our world, about the apparently growing numbers of 'open roaders' who prefer to court chaos and adventure to sate their jaded palates? They are imposing their preferences on the rest of us, some of us, who, like Mole, just want to live quietly in familiar and loved surroundings. What about those of us who, like the Rat, find all our needs, most importantly our spiritual needs, met by the known world? Do we not have the right to the ordered and established life that we've known and loved? Or do we passively accept the chaos brought to us by the open-roaders who crave endless variety and 'diversity'?

In the book, Toad's obsession with excitement and danger had to be dealt with; he was 'taken in hand' by his sensible friends, and gave up his rackety life, albeit reluctantly. But perhaps having lost his home to the marauders temporarily had a sobering effect on him. Will losing our home have a similar effect on our liberal Toads?

It's possible, some would say, to read too much symbolism into works of literature or entertainment, but to me, sometimes insights come alive in ways that they would not otherwise. The best works of literature, to me, are the ones which have many different layers or levels, and which make us ponder and think about the big questions.

The Wind in the Willows, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, seem in many ways to speak more to our generation, if we are willing to look and listen, than they did to the generation in which they appeared.

The Scots-Irish, revisited

Are we going to have an all Scots-Irish ticket on the Democrat side?
There is talk of Jim Webb being a potential running mate for the inevitable Barack Obama.

Whether he really has a chance at the VP slot remains to be seen, but this whole Scots-Irish thing, which keeps being raised during this election, is rather vexing, because it contains within it a lot of suppositions, speculations, and half-truths. And to me it's important because truth is important, and because of what it says about our American history and origins, and what it implies about race and heredity and allegiances.

Webb's earlier book, 'Born Fighting' helps foster an oversimplified picture of the South, its people and culture, and the roles of various groups throughout our history. While some on the right have considered Webb to be 'on our side', particularly on the issues of the Confederacy and on Southron culture, his time in office has shown him to be mostly just another Democrat politician who can be quite politically correct when necessary. For instance, he voted 'yes' on amnesty, and apparently in his new book, titles a chapter "A Nation Descended from Many Nations." Not a good sign, although the linked article insists that he is still a populist when it comes to the interests of the 'average' working American in respect to immigration. Still, he seems to follow the party line in most respects:

WHILE BOTH LIBERALS and conservatives alike have claimed Webb, many of his actual policy views are unformed and prone to shift. He defended capital gains tax cuts during the 2006 Senate race but complains in A Time to Fight that the cap gains rate is lower than the income tax on wages. He has abandoned his critiques of feminism, affirmative action, and leading Democrats. He represents Middle Ohio's views on trade and outsourcing but not on values: he is reliably pro-abortion and supportive of same-sex marriage. Webb's margin of victory over George Allen came not from the conservative parts of Virginia but the liberal D.C.-spillover suburbs up north.''

This does not sound like the sort of record that would win over many of the 'Bubbas' that both parties are so prone to alienate.

From a rather biased review of his book Born Fighting, some of the flaws are nonetheless identified correctly:

...For Webb, a descendant of Scots-Irish immigrants who has written novels, fought with highly decorated distinction in Vietnam, and served as secretary of the navy and assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, the political culture of the Scots-Irish is defined by hyperpatriotism, a devotion to strong leaders, and individualist self-reliance. "It has shaped the emotional fabric of the nation, defined America's unique form of populist democracy, created a distinctly American musical style, and through the power of its insistence on personal honor and adamant individualism has become the definition of 'American' that others gravitate toward when they wish to drop their hyphens and join the cultural mainstream," he writes.

But the Scots-Irish impact on American politics is more problematic than Webb would have us believe. The populist politics they pioneered doesn't necessarily produce the sort of values that sustain liberty. Indeed, the democratic impulse toward comfort and safety often undercuts self-reliance and individualism. Webb's book, though well-written and often insightful, is more an exercise in ethnic self-mythologizing than an evenhanded attempt to judge the impact of the Scots-Irish and their culture on America.''

Webb, according to his book, Born Fighting, seems to think that the 'redneck' population of the South, who are mostly Scots-Irish in his belief, were not naturally antagonistic to the freed slaves. In his view, both were at the bottom of the social ladder, and should naturally be brothers or allies in the struggle against the Anglo-Saxon overlords.

One of the tragedies of history, Webb observes, is that given their bottom-of- the-ladder status, the Scots-Irish and the freed slave became antagonists, unable to make common cause. It’s not too late to cooperate, he suggests, in general.''

I suppose the ultimate cooperation, for Webb, might be to join the Obama ticket in the vice-presidential spot, and this would bring together the supposed natural allies, the white underclass and the black underclass, (using liberal terminology).

And further from the same article, we read of the Scots-Irish:

Protestant in origin, they are not to be confused, as they often are, to their disadvantage, with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant WASPs who at one time were widely believed to control the world, in America. Webb debunks even this.

Since WASPs, by that light, need no government help, when the Scots-Irish are lumped in with them, they also seem to need no government care or concern. This is a mistake which makes affirmative action programs for African-Americans that much more difficult to accept, as I read Webb, since they single out one needy group for relief as another equally needy group is ignored and allowed to wallow in the hills.''

So the Scots-Irish are now going to be seen as another needy group, deserving of 'affirmative action' or other such charity? Shouldn't that be anathema to Scots-Irish people, seeing as they are said to be proud and fiercely independent? Or am I expecting too much consistency here?

I find this whole worldview, seeing divisions based on class and economic level as being primal, while race is relatively insignificant, to be the quintessence of the Democrat/leftist doctrine.

And it's also rather paradoxical that a man like Webb who is apparently hyper-conscious of his 'Scots-Irish' ancestry, and who attributes so much to heredity and genes in the case of the Scots-Irish, would think that genetics ultimately mean so little. Recently there have been so many op-eds discussing the 'racism' of West Virginia, supposedly on display in their choice of Clinton over Obama. So the doctrinaire liberal view is that 'racism' is prevalent in Appalachia and the South generally; does Webb think, or do the Democrat party honchos think, that this deep-rooted 'bigotry' can be eliminated by putting 'one of their own', a white Scots-Irish Virginian, on the ticket alongside Obama? It seems they are all contradicting themselves.

If the 'race-transcending' rhetoric of Obama and the liberals of the world is true, then all of Webb's theorizing about the Scots-Irish and their culture is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We're all the same, so why even bother to talk about our ancestors and our genetics, or the personality traits that came from our fathers?

As I said before, the idea of the 'Celtic South' does seem to be an oversimplification, dismissing the substantial Anglo-Saxon makeup of much of the South. It's just, as I said previously, nobody wants to be Anglo-Saxon; it's cooler to be of some colorful, feisty, fiercely independent, and yet suffering, ethnicity.

Very few of us in America represent just one ethnicity, except for those whose parents are immigrants, or whose grandparents were all immigrants. This is most especially true among those who are just whites, rather than ethnic whites whose forebears tended to congregate in enclaves or clannish, endogamous ethnic neighborhoods in urban areas.

The media tend to keep referring to John McCain's supposed Scots-Irish/Southron roots, even though he was not raised in the South, and he apparently has quite a few Anglo-Saxon ancestors. But in our oversimplified world, I suppose colorful, underdog ethnic ancestry cancels out the boring Anglo-Saxon blood.

I would wager that even Webb, the arch-Celt, is at least partly Anglo-Saxon.
But then again, given that a recent article I linked to claimed that Barack Obama himself is 'Scots-Irish' on his mother's side, then an Obama-Webb ticket could claim to be all Scots-Irish. All in the family.

Freud and conservatism

Over at the Forum, (where it's been eerily quiet lately) John Savage started a thread about Freud's ideas being cited by conservatives, which I find a rather interesting topic.

... I would like to bring up this question for those with a better knowledge of psychology than myself: Hasn't most of Freud's work been debunked? I know that Kevin MacDonald said so to some extent in Culture of Critique, but it was peripheral to his point. Most people, though, continue to argue as if Freud were still an unchallenged authority.
[...]
Isn't it about time we called out Freudian language whenever we saw it, and made it clear that the speaker was using pseudoscience? We wouldn't take seriously anyone who tried to argue a point by appealing to the geocentric theory of the solar system, or the phlogiston theory, or the theory of the luminiferous ether. Why should we be giving Freud this undeserved respect either?

Why do we treat Freud as some great scientific authority? His ideas have certainly had a considerable effect on our culture, and yet we don't really examine them critically.

I hope those who have an opinion to offer will come over to the thread and comment.

How the GOP cheated Ron Paul and America

Posted (H/T Patroon) over at Conservative Heritage Times is this link:

How a GOP conspiracy continues to cheat Ron Paul

...here is an establishment conspiracy to keep Ron Paul’s campaign from embarrassing the Republican Party.

Oh yeah, I know, conspiracy theories are not allowed and conspiracies do not actually exist.
[...]
What I am saying is that he has been the subject of numerous meetings of GOP establishment figures and they have exchanged ideas and techniques for keeping him and his minions at bay. I know because I was accidentally and spontaneously in the middle of just such a conversation.

Last week I appeared on a number of television programs and ended up in “the green room” with a couple of GOP luminaries. One of the party’s most famous and powerful Senators and a former governor who came within a hair of becoming the vice president. You can guess which television network it was. We each had a book to promote.

Anyway, somehow they got into a discussion of Ron Paul and how his supporters had the nerve, the gall, the cheek to show up at “their” respective Republican State Conventions and practically take over. Each man described to the other how through parliamentary maneuver and outright theft they had recently blocked the Paulistas from embarrassing the GOP by winning “their” delegates to the national convention. They passed these stories back and forth with great gusto and laughter and genuine appreciation for the political skill of the other.

“Well,” I interrupted, “Why was all that necessary in the first place? Who are these people? Why are their ideas so popular? And why block them? Shouldn’t the party welcome such activists into the process? Is the party so insecure that it has to cheat to protect itself? And what will the people who got cheated think about the GOP? Is this a lost opportunity? Maybe the GOP got cheated?”

You would have thought I was questioning the Virgin Birth. They turned on “the green room idiot” and patronizingly explained to me how the nomination belonged to McCain now and good soldiers had to rally around the standard bearer.''

Of course the idea that there was a concerted effort among the GOP to derail Ron Paul's candidacy, and to marginalize and discredit him and his supporters is nothing new, but this report by a party insider seems to make it official.

But it's exactly what most of us surmised was happening. There was too much evidence of dirty work at the crossroads at various debates, caucuses, and conventions to be able to discount such accusations.

What kind of political party resorts to this kind of thing in order to shut out certain ideas and the people who carry the forbidden ideas? A corrupt party, a morally bankrupt party, an out-of-touch, elitist party, an anti-democratic party, a dishonest party, a party which is desperate because it knows that the party's 'ideas', such as they are, and its favored candidates, are losers in a free and open market of ideas.

I am sure somebody will assert that all our political parties fit this description and I won't dispute that, sad as that fact is. But the fact that 'everybody does it' and that Tweedledum on the other side is just as bad or worse than 'our' Tweedledee is no excuse, and it's certainly no comfort.

The two-party 'Emperor' has no clothes, and a lot of people see that now. It's not just disgruntled Ron Paul supporters who see that.

Zogby Poll: 48% of Voters Dissatisfied With Candidates

But having seen the obvious, as many people apparently have, according to that poll, knowing that the candidates on offer represent an abysmal choice, or no choice at all, and knowing that the system is rigged against us, will people finally walk away? Or will they continue to play along and vote for one of the unacceptable candidates, rationalizing it as inevitable and the best we can hope for?

For many people, I get the impression that voting against somebody is more important than voting for anybody -- with the possible exceptions of the cult members who worship Obama. According to the poll, many of those brainwashed cultists are females, probably younger females.

Obama fares best among female voters, of whom 37 percent said they would not vote for him, compared to 41 percent who would never vote for Clinton, and nearly half (48 percent) who said they would not vote for McCain.

Most men (57 percent) said they would never cast a vote for Clinton and 50 percent said the same of Obama, while slightly more than a third (36 percent) said they would never vote for McCain.

Older voters are most likely to be resistant to voting for Clinton: 56 percent of those over 65 said they would never vote for her, compared 46 percent of those younger than 30.

These older voters show similar opposition to Obama: 53 percent of those older than 65 would never vote for Obama, but just 34 percent of those younger than 30 said the same. In contrast, younger voters show the most resistance to voting for McCain — half of those younger than 30 would never vote for the Arizona senator, compared to 36 percent of those older than 65.''

The last couple of paragraphs seem to indicate that despite the claims of a conservative resurgence among the younger generations (as opposed to the supposedly still-leftist baby boomers) more of the younger folks are politically correct to a greater extent than their supposedly liberal elders.

Given the generally liberal and politically correct attitudes of most of the younger generations, there is not much hope of any kind of conservative or traditional renaissance in America. Unless we can manage some kind of emergency de-programming of the PC-brainwashed, we are about to go gentle into that good night.

I honestly think a President Ron Paul was one glimmer of hope for change in this country, and for a halt to the ever-leftward trend. I don't harbor illusions that Dr. Paul would initiate all the policies I would like, such as a complete closing of the borders and a halt to immigration, but he was our best chance at a real change.

The GOP powers-that-be went all out to thwart the Paul 'revolution' and I am sure they are all high-fiving each other at their ''success.''

I truly hope that the party has sealed its own demise by its shortsighted policies. It deserves that fate.

Caveat emptor

I haven't blogged much about the issue for some time, because it seems to be one of those situations that provokes a feeling of helplessness to do anything about it, but the issue of our unsafe imported products is still very much with us.

I had quite a time the other day, shopping for vitamins and mineral supplements made in the U.S.A. It was not until many of these news items on toxic Chinese products began to appear that I became aware that most of our vitamins are made in China. Some months back, I discarded all the vitamins and supplements I had that were made in China.

Hot on the heels of the poisoned pet food scandal, and reported instances of toxic food and toothpaste, all eyes are now turning toward the Chinese vitamin market. How safe are they?

The industry in China appears to be split between top-notch operations and bottom-of-the-barrel producers. Since the United States does not require country-of-origin labels for any of our drugs, foods or supplements, there is no telling where that vitamin you are taking came from.

China also suffers from the same conflict of interest that we are seeing here in the United States, where the regulators have financial interest in the industries they are supposed to regulate and inspect.''

The article is rather useless since it resorts to the old line about how we should not rely on supplements anyway (ergo, don't worry about those possibly poisonous vitamins; just eat your spinach). But what if one's doctor recommends extra vitamins to cover a deficiency? Sometimes you need to buy the vitamins in a bottle; you can't get enough from your everyday diet in many cases.

This article mentions the bogus medicines coming out of China, as a result of which some people have serious illnesses worsen because the 'medicines' they bought are fake. And then there was the underreported and underdiscussed story of the toxic heparin.

China is now the world's largest producer of active pharmaceutical ingredients — the chemical compounds needed to make finished pills and other drugs. In 2005, China had $4.4 billion, or 14%, of the world's $31 billion market for active drug ingredients, according to a report last year from Credit Suisse.

Recent testimony from the Government Accountability Office said that the FDA may only inspect around 7% of foreign drug-making facilities in a given year, and it would take the agency more than 13 years at that rate to inspect all the plants. The testimony also said the FDA "cannot provide the exact number of foreign establishments that have never been inspected."

The agency also had varying counts of how many overseas facilities ship drug ingredients to the U.S.''

So thanks to the dereliction or the outright amorality of our government, we have no guarantee, or even a reasonable certainty, that any medications we take are what they purport to be, or that they are safe for human consumption.

American lives will remain at risk until the FDA commits the resources necessary to inspect imported drugs and drug ingredients," said Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who heads the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in a statement yesterday.''

As for my quest for American-made vitamins, after an hour or two of searching the shelves of two retailers, we found some 'made in U.S.A.' vitamin and mineral supplements, one of them from a company called Nature's Bounty. Thank goodness for companies like them.

Why are made-in-America vitamins so hard to find? Why are made-in-America products in general so scarce these days? Most of the products have labels saying that the product was 'distributed by' someone in the U.S., but which coyly avoid saying where the product was actually made.

And it isn't just vitamins.
A while back, a relative of mine pointed out to me that many products which pretend by their names to be produced in America are actually imported. For instance, 'Alaskan salmon' that actually comes from Thailand. What is this about? It seems to be an effort to deceive the consumer.

Another example, from the Galveston County Daily News:

The images and stories are not pleasant: shrimp raised overseas, en masse in stagnant ponds pumped full of antibiotics so the shellfish won’t die from their own filth.

Even more unpleasant: Untold numbers of potentially harmful shrimp make their way into American markets, with labels such as “Gulf shrimp” and “New Orleans shrimp” that belie their true origins.

The domestic shrimp industry, reeling from high fuel prices and cheap imports that now make up 90 percent of the shrimp consumed in the United States, has a delicate balancing act. It wants to educate consumers about imports without scaring them away from shrimp altogether.

The industry is pressuring the federal government to revamp the way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspects shipments — only a tiny fraction are inspected, much less tested — and some in the industry want new laws requiring better disclosure of the origins of seafood.

If a foreign supplier refuses entry to American inspectors, the FDA has no legal authority to deny imports from that supplier, said Michael Taylor, a former FDA policy commissioner and professor of health policy at George Washington University.''

A friend of mine recently got quite sick from shrimp, although she's never had a problem with it in the past. If she checked out the origin of the shrimp that made her ill, she would probably find that it was imported from some third-world country, such as Vietnam or China.

The FDA has standards for imported seafood, but even if it did have legal authority to inspect every foreign supplier, government audits reveal the FDA is spread so thin that foreign firms can send potentially harmful seafood to the United States almost at will.

The FDA has banned chloramphenicol, an antibiotic known to cause aplastic anemia, a serious blood disease in humans.

Other markets such as the European Union have found chloramphenicol in shrimp imported from China and Vietnam, resulting in bans of certain imports.''

Read the entire article. Surprisingly, the U.S. Department of Commerce is giving grants to shrimpers in the Gulf Coast region to start a marketing group for their shrimp. The group's website is here, and it's a very nice site with a lot of useful information for consumers.

New Orleans shrimp has nothing to do with coming from Louisiana,” said Deborah Long, a spokeswoman for the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “It means New Orleans style. There’s Cajun spices on the shrimp.”

Federal law requires country-of-origin labeling on seafood sold at retail. But the same rules don’t apply to restaurants.

Lawmakers in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana have introduced bills aimed at tightening the rules, which have always drawn staunch opposition from restaurant associations, even deep in Cajun country, where shrimp is a matter of pride.''

Nonetheless, the article is rather pessimistic overall about the chances for a resuscitation of the ailing shrimp industry in the Gulf.

One wonders why the government, at least the Department of Commerce, is giving grants to this group while at the same time appearing to work against the interests of producers in this country in favor of those in Third World countries. The global agenda takes priority over all else, and globalism marches on, despite its mounting toll of casualties.

More on confused conservatives

Maybe it's only because my attention is focused on it, but the libertarian-conservative division keeps cropping up in various places.
Here, at VDare, is a piece called 'Bob Barr, Born-Again Libertarian, Backsliding on Mass Immigration.'
Read it if you haven't already.

When a question was raised in the comments recently about Barr's candidacy, I didn't have much information at hand about Barr's positions; I knew he had been pretty solid on immigration in the past, and his 'Immigration Report Card' showed that, but I had some qualms about his recent statements, and the linked article spells out the warning signs of Barr's 'new tone.'

But it's pretty obvious that, to court the doctrinaire libertarians, Barr would have to drop his pro-enforcement rhetoric of the past and instead talk about 'free movement of labor' or 'letting immigrants participate in The Market'. Obviously he is singing a new song. Maybe he has had some kind of drastic conversion experience or it may just be saying what he needs to say to get the support he needs.

And this change of positions on immigration and borders should illustrate clearly how conservatives (at least the genuine ones) and libertarians part company. I think it should be clear to anybody with any discernment that it is not possible to be conservative and libertarian, or to blend the two conflicting views. However, the libertarian views seem simply to be crowding out the old conservative principles among many Republicans.

Barr himself is probably not 'confused'; he is playing politics. But many voters who think themselves conservative are the ones who are confused if they can't differentiate between the libertarian position on borders and sovereignty, and the conservative.

For another illustration of the differences, see the discussion linked to at the Open City blog, where blogger John S. Bolton is crossing swords with a libertarian on the question of immigration:

The thread where the rather short discussion takes place is called 'Not All Muslims are Bad.' What a typical statement by Bolton's opponent. This is one of the favorite lines of leftists, and it seems libertarians too often share the failings of liberals. Whenever someone makes a generalization, the retort from the liberal is always 'not all [fill in the blank] are like that.' I mean, in these discussions, no one is claiming that each and every member of the group in question is the same, or that all are 'bad.' The issue is always generalities. But the liberals always cite a one-in-a-thousand exception and triumphantly claim this disproves the generalization. Why is it so hard to show people that an exception here and there does not disprove the general rule? The average is what counts, where groups of people are concerned.
But to a libertarian, we are all just individuals, laws unto ourselves, with absolutely nothing in common with other members of the group we belong to.

Again, libertarians betray their liberal/leftist roots in their lack of logic and their appeal to simplistic ideas.

Maybe out of all this discussion and debate, we will get a clarifying of principles regarding libertarianism vs. conservatism, and people will make some kind of coherent choice between the two camps, as it seems obvious we can't be both libertarian and conservative, as some claim to be. Do we simply live in an age in which people insist on idiosyncractic choices and labels, some kind of personalized politics which chooses one from column A and one from column B, Chinese-menu style? It certainly seems that way.

Are we becoming less politically consistent, and more personality-oriented in politics? People seem to be choosing too often based on personality and 'charisma' and glibness, rather than on principle of any kind. Decades of maleducation and media propaganda take their toll.

Where have all the conservatives gone?

During the last several days, I've been following the discussion of the 'gay marriage' issue around the conservative blogosphere, and I've been rather dismayed, as I indicated earlier, at the listless defense of traditional marriage offered by 'conservatives.' In some discussions, few real defenses of traditional marriage were made; most of the comments seemed to be of a decidedly libertarian bent, such as 'keep government out of marriage; it's the business of the consenting adults only.''

So it seems John Donne was wrong, as I said; every man is an island.

Now, I don't necessarily want to re-open the discussion on 'gay' 'marriage' per se; we didn't all agree on the issue here, and I consider my regular commenters much more reliably conservative or traditional than the average 'conservative' on most forums or blogs. But even we were not united in a defense of traditional marriage.

What would the average American, (not the average Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal) have thought of the idea of homosexual marriage, of government-approved male-male or female-female unions 50 years ago? Or even 30 years ago, circa 1978? Would we have heard so many 'it's their private business' comments back then?

Would we have anticipated the possibility of homosexual marriage even 20 years ago, in 1988, at the end of Reagan's terms in office?

So what happened in our society in recent decades that has led to this wholesale weakening and abandonment of traditions and customs and old-fashioned Christian morality?

The answer from liberals would be ''we are outgrowing bigotry, and progressives have won the battle for equality and civil rights for all" or something of that nature. Some Republicans or conservatives would give the stock reply: liberalism has changed everything. Democrats have pushed these ideas. But far more Republicans or conservatives would not see a problem with the changes that have been wrought since the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. They have been part of those changes, and approve, even if only passively.

Many people who vote Republican or who call themselves conservatives are half-converted liberals and progressives themselves. They often have not fully re-thought the liberal/leftist values they absorbed as young people in the 60s and 70s, or they have decided that being 'conservative' is a matter of voting for the Republicans, and of approving of capitalism, since they may have joined the capitalist class after having been fervently anti-capitalist as college students. But other than their fiscal views, many on the right have not reconsidered their individualist, hedonist, personal morality despite the fact that they stopped voting Democrat.

Hedonism and invididualism are popular across the board because they are part of our fallen human nature. In Christian terminology, we'd say they appeal to our 'flesh', to our carnal human nature. They are really the default position for fallen human beings, and the old morality which is weakening by the day, kept those tendencies somewhat in check.

Another factor which is often overlooked: the considerable influence of libertarianism on many young people, especially those who came of age during the reign of the counterculture. Many young people, especially those of the 'sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll' set, embraced libertarian ideas in some fashion. I've known my share of such people, and their attraction to libertarianism had to do with wanting their favorite recreational drugs to be fully legal and easily available. And most young people in any era have a strong anti-authority, rebellious bent, which tendency was greatly popularized in the 1960s and in every generation since.

Libertarianism has been very influential since the 1960s and seems to be even more so with each decade, although the party which bears the name has not gained that many members.

The libertarian-conservative clash is also being seen in discussions going on at TakiMag. I won't link to those discussions; I assume most of you have been following them if not participating. Suffice it to say those of a libertarian leaning over there are denouncing the 'collectivists' and 'racists' on the conservative side -- as if there are really that many; most conservatives toe the PC line where race is concerned, and far too many express the libertarian sentiment that ''we're all just individuals". So I think the TakiMag crowd can relax; the racially conscious are far outnumbered by the PC 'colorblind' crowd.

I think far too many on our side have bought into libertarianism to some extent without even recognizing that is what they are doing, or they fully realize their libertarian leanings, but think libertarianism is compatible with, or even a variation of, conservatism.

I say this isn't true, or that there is an overlap in certain areas, while the differences are pronounced on the most important issues.

This website has a lengthy but worthwhile essay on
What's wrong with libertarianism


Here are a few salient quotes, pointing out the flaws of libertarianism:

The Un-Communism

Libertarianism strikes me as if someone (let's call her "Ayn Rand") sat down to create the Un-Communism. Thus:

Communism vs. Libertarianism
Property is theft vs. Property is sacred
Totalitarianism vs. Any government is bad
Capitalists are baby-eating villains vs. Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes
Workers should rule vs. Worker activism is evil
The poor are oppressed vs. The poor are pampered good-for-nothings"

I've noticed this kind of knee-jerk reaction to leftist ideas; while the leftists are generally wrong, we don't necessarily want to go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum in a simplistic overreaction, as Rand and her cult followers seem wont to do. I have noticed the same mentality among many of the mainstream GOP loyalists. The left denounces capitalism, and so Republicans deny that capitalism can ever do wrong.

A look at the news story coming out of Postville, Iowa should disabuse us of that idea quickly. And lest anybody say that it's an atypical situation, this kind of thing is going on, perhaps rather less egregiously, in many towns. Capitalism and corporate rapacity are a big factor in the immigration problem and the 'globalism' juggernaut.

In a libertarian society, capitalism would be pretty much unfettered to do this kind of thing. I think it's easy to forget the excesses of business during the 'robber baron' era.

The writer mentions that libertarianism, like communism, has never been tried and proven to be feasible. It's a utopian idea.

Who needs facts?

The methodology isn't much different either: oppose the obvious evils of the world with a fairy tale. The communist of 1910 couldn't point to a single real-world instance of his utopia; neither can the present-day libertarian. Yet they're unshakeable in their conviction that it can and must happen.
[...]
An untested political system unfortunately has great rhetorical appeal. Since we can't see it in action, we can't point out its obvious faults, while the ideologue can be caustic about everything that has actually been tried, and which has inevitably fallen short of perfection. Perhaps that's why Dave Barry and Trey Parker are libertarians. But I'd rather vote for a politician who's shown that his programs work in the real world than for a humorist, however amusing.''

The writer then asks, if libertarians are a small group of people with an untested set of ideals, why we should worry about them:

Why are they trouble?

Crackpots are usually harmless; how about the Libertarian Party?

In itself, I'm afraid, it's nothing but a footnote. It gets no more than 1% of the vote-- a showing that's been surpassed historically by the Anti-Masonic Party, the Greenbacks, the Prohibition Party, the Socialists, the Greens, and whatever John Anderson was. If that was all it was, I wouldn't bother to devote pages and rants to it. I'm all for the expression of pure eccentricity in politics; I like the Brits' Monster Raving Looney Party even better.


Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian "Government is Bad" horse and ridden far with it:

* Reagan's "Government is the problem"
* Phil Gramm's contention that the country's "economic crisis" and "moral crisis" were due to "the explosion of government"
* Talk radio hosts' advocacy of armed resistance to "jack-booted government thugs"
* Dole's 1996 campaign, advancing the notion that taxes were "Your Money" being taken from you
* Gingrich's Contract with America (welfare cuts, tax cuts, limitations on corporations' responsibility and on the government's ability to regulate them)
* Dick Armey's comment that Medicare (medical aid for the elderly) is "a program I would have no part of in a free world"


* Bush's tax cuts, intended not only to reward the rich but to "starve the beast", in Grover Norquist's words: to create a permanent deficit as a dangerous ploy to reduce social spending
* Jeb Bush's hope that the Florida state government buildings would one day be empty
* Intellectual support for attacks on the quality of working life in this county and for undoing the New Deal.''

So, did libertarian ideologues set out to infiltrate the Republican Party? I have no doubt that 'progressives' have done so; they made no secret of their plan to subvert and to take over institutions, including political parties, by subtlety, from within. But whether libertarians have done so as an organized plan, or whether their ideas have just crept into our popular consciousness in the post-counterculture era, the fact is, libertarian ideas seem to be more predominant among Republicans and conservatives than traditional ideas.

Even the paleoconservatives, who I once naively thought were 'conservatives' conservatives' seem to be very libertarian-influenced, even more so in some ways than the Main Street Republicans or country-clubbers.

And on social issues, libertarians are most often in sympathy with leftist/progressive/liberal thinking, especially on 'personal morality' questions like homosexual rights, drugs, and racial issues. Although libertarians claim to be strongly for freedom of association, they side with liberals/leftists on race issues, although unlike liberals who believe in group rights, they denounce 'collectivism'. On balance, though, I think libertarians and liberals have more in common than they have differences.

This writer, C.J. Carnacchio, seems to agree. He says that there has been a centuries-long philosophical war between the two camps:

While superficially conservatives and libertarians have a political alliance based on a mutual support of the free market and opposition to the omnipotent State, philosophically we are mortal enemies.
[...]
Unfortunately, most modern-day conservatives and libertarians are ignorant about this 200 year old quarrel. Most believe the alliance based on superficial common interests is sound political practice. But the conservatives’ pact with the libertarians has been most harmful to the cause of true conservatism as expounded by Burke.''

He ends the piece (which I encourage you to read in its entirety) with this quote from Russell Kirk:

Adversity sometimes makes strange bedfellows, but the present successes of conservatives disincline them to lie down, lamblike, with the libertarian lions.”

Unfortunately, Kirk must have written that during a time in which conservatism was much sounder than it is today, and our present weakness seems to be inclining us to make some improvident choices.

Or maybe it's not a matter of choice; I tend to think that many conservatives, unfortunately, are like liberals in that they do not make conscious choices, but drift with the tides, or adopt certain poses under peer pressure, or on an emotional knee-jerk basis.

In any case, it seems as though conservatives, to use Yeats' words, ''lack all conviction" these days, and are not prepared to make any sort of credible defense of our traditions. And if conservatives don't, who will?

54 years ago today:

The front page pictured above is that of a mainstream newspaper 54 years ago. The way the story is headlined (and notice also at the top of the front page: 'The Iron Fist in 'Free' America) is a stark illustration of how attitudes, especially in the media, have changed since May 17, 1954.

Just something to ponder.

'The triremes of our age'

"... it has been repeatedly observed that the presence of an out group, especially one evincing hostility, promotes the loyalty of people to their own group.. For this reason, nationalistic movements among nationals living under what they consider to be foreign or alien domination are likely to grow strong when conditions are bad and can be ascribed to the alien power.. Interference with a people's language not only is a symbolic insult but also creates difficulties of a realistic sort in simple communication." - Leonard W. Doob: Patriotism and Nationalism -Their Psychological Foundations , 1964

The above quote, which you will notice is from 44 years ago, seems to lend credence to the suddenly popular idea that 'worse is better.' If the writer is correct about nationalistic movements thriving when people are threatened by outside domination, then we are overdue for a resurgence of nationalism.

There has been a lot of discussing and debating, much of it of a hair-splitting nature, on some blogs recently, concerning nationalism. Is it the same as patriotism? Tribalism? Is it good or bad? I've concluded as of some time ago that nationalism is not that militant flag-waving attitude nor is it loyalty to a state apparatus or a political leader or a flag or even to a piece of soil, although that last part is important. To me, it's about people, about our large extended family.

Not so very long ago, in a discussion thread, a European commenter haughtily informed me that we Americans are people of no race and no ethnicity; we are, she implied, just a ragtag assortment of unrelated peoples who ended up in one particular area of the Western hemisphere. That point of view is heard with monotonous frequency whenever the subject of American identity, specifically that of the white majority in America, comes up. And those who favor flooding America with ever increasing numbers of people from around the world like to disparage our identity and our right to claim a living space of our own. If we are not a people or a race, then we can have no claim on a territory or a government of our own.

I've blogged about how the original colonists who settled New England were a rather homogeneous group, overwhelmingly of English origin, and mostly from one particular region of England. These 21,000 men and women and children who came from England during the 1620s and 1630s were the progenitors of the people of New England as they existed for a couple of centuries before mass non-Anglo immigration began. And likewise, I've written about the Jamestown colonists, who, while a rather less homogeneous group than the Massachusetts colonists, coming from different regions of England, were the founding stock of the Southern colonies. In the case of the New England descendants, they were by far more affected by the waves of the 'diverse' immigrants of the 19th century than were the Southron people, who received comparatively little immigration, with a few rather rare exceptions.

Nonetheless, despite the later waves of immigrants, the majority population of America maintained a certain degree of homogeneity for centuries, especially in the areas which received fewer immigrants. The tendency to marry within one's own group maintained a degree of homogeneity. Yet the idea that this country is a vast melting pot, populated by people of confused ancestry, persists, especially among the multicultists.

I've tried to make the case that we are not this mixed multitude that the liberals like to say we are. And even though many Americans have a mix of various Western and Northern European genes, that hardly means that we are some kind of raceless 'world citizens' of no determinate origin.

Even if we were, would that still render us undeserving or unqualified to claim a distinct identity and a territory of our own? JWH at Western Biopolitics makes a case that it does not mean any such thing.


.

..Besides the obvious possibility that the racially misinformed are simply wrong about the degree of "admixture" in group X (and, hence, all else that follows from their "argument" is irrelevant), the argument itself is illogical and inconsistent with the idea of ethnic genetic interests. Ethnic genetic interests are forward looking. It doesn't really matter how a particular group got to be as it is; in the last analysis, as long as the group is genetically distinct from other groups, then it, and its members, have genetic interests in group continuity. Just because a group may be highly admixed, doesn't mean that that group's genepool as a whole, and the individual members of that genepool, do not have genetic interests, including interests at the group level. Nor does it mean that members of that group cannot be "racialists" or "preservationists" or what have you - as long as they wish to preserve their own group (and, hopefully, support other groups' rights along those lines), then how are they not racial preservationists? And what gives an outgroup member the right to decide what X's "identity" is and how X members should focus on that identity to pursue genetic interests? What gives an outgroup member the right to distort and delegitimize another group's racial identity and pursuit of genetic interests? X members do not need the permission of non-X members to pursue X genetic interests.''

The term 'ethnic genetic interests' is one that most if not all of my readers are familiar with, I believe. But when we talk to average people, how many of them will grasp the meaning of that term? Is there some way we can get across to ordinary people how we and our EGI are being harmed by mass immigration and the political correctness that makes it possible for harmful immigration policies to go unchallenged? I think it's crucial that we find some way to get this idea across to the people in our lives.

A popular complaint heard on blogs like this one is that 'we all talk about these issues but nobody is doing anything about it; we're just keyboard warriors,' or 'complainers' or some such dismissive label. Yet is not talking about these things essential also? Talking among ourselves is a part of 'doing something', as we exchange ideas, refine our own beliefs and opinions, gather arguments in favor of our cause, and sometimes disagree on various points. But 'iron sharpens iron.' Talking and discussing is part of 'doing something'. And talking to others who may not (yet) share our views is very important. But we have to find ways to do it; the right vocabulary, the right arguments.

Many people respond primarily to emotions or to visceral feelings rather than to reason and ideas, unfortunately. Many people are visually-oriented rather than verbally oriented. But in whatever way, it's important to be able to be prepared, at just the right moment, to open up discussions with those around us.

In most cases, people are concerned first and foremost with their immediate day-to-day lives. Most of us in the blogosphere are 'news junkies' and political junkies, and in that, we are probably exceptions.

So, how do we work around the exclusive focus on the personal and the immediate? Again, JWH addresses that very thing in this post:

First, it goes without saying that the “mass” are always going to be primarily, or even exclusively, concerned with proximate interests, issues that they deal with in their every day life. I do hold out hope that EGI can eventually be transmitted to the masses in some form which they can digest, understand, and value. However, it is almost certainly the case that proximate concerns will always be paramount to the masses, with ultimate interests being an afterthought, if even that.

The masses are primarily concerned with security, comfort, and status. It is no coincidence that outbursts of “identity politics” occur during periods of shock and stress: wars, depressions, and other forms of social upheaval. It is the responsibility of the intellectual activist elite to prepare for such crises by formulating analyses which allow for wise policy choices to be made when the time comes to do so. An analogy made was to the navy. It is during peacetime when the fleet must be built, the commanders trained, and the weapons stockpiled; if you wait until the war actually starts it may well be too late. For example, the point was made that the Ancient Greeks survived the Persian invasion primarily because the Athenian elite had the foresight to undertake a ship-building program years earlier. It has been said: