Past Ruminations...

June 21-30, 2002

Time and young boys. My daughter is about to turn 25 and is largely self-sufficient. My visiting nephew is twelve, a boy, and hyperactive. His self-sufficiency lasts for 10-15 minute chunks of time. My time is being overwhelmed by work, the coming holiday and the need to finish the kitchen floor, work, more work, and even more work. I don't think I will be able to do anything for a while.

(June 28, 2002)   Ý

The pigeons coming home to roost. One of my favorite columnists, Peggy Noonan, lamented today about Capitalism Betrayed. Now some people have pilloried Noonan as passé and irrelevant, but I think she is a careful thinker, one who sometimes hits homeruns. Her central point in this column is

Something is wrong with--what shall we call it? Wall Street, Big Business. We'll call it Big Money. Something has been wrong with it for a long time, at least a decade, maybe more. Probably more. I don't fully understand it. I can't imagine that it's this simple: A new generation of moral and ethical zeroes rose to run Big Money over the past decade, and nobody quite noticed but they were genuinely bad people who were running the system into the ground.

I think the whole article is one of her home runs. However, it started me thinking along a different tack, one of morals, ethics, and the religious underpinnings of our American society. Ever since the economic boom following World War II allowed the emergence of a large middle class in America, we have seen the rapid growth of liberalism, which had its full flowering in late 60's with the expression of the hippie counter culture and antiwar movement.

The counter culture and liberalism were intrinsically linked. They both conspired to remove the Christian underpinnings of American economic and social culture. God was dead said Time magazine and all progressive thinkers, at least the Christian God was, and they argued that we were modern enough to move forward into the glorious future without the unnecessary trappings of religion, at least the Christian religion. Free love, free sex, free expression of even our basest desires, we could have it all they told us.

Since the 60's, the American Christian heritage has been systematically assaulted in every venue of life and public policy by this entrenched liberalism, which successfully stole the Democratic party from its union and wholesome working family base, and took over every major and most minor universities. While Johnson's Great Society initiative destroyed the Black family structure, the current same-sex initiatives are poised to destroy the White family structure.

As a result, we are now seeing the fruits of those liberal efforts of dereligionizing America come home to roost. We have raised a generation of amoral robber barons whose first question is "What's in it for me?" Black culture champions rap disgusta and glorifies the drug kingpin while White culture slides into total hedonism and sexual depravity while giving lip service to liberal causes, as long it advances their agendas. The classic example of this is the Clintons. Their tenure in the White House made duplicity a virtue and amorality something to be admired, as long as you voiced the proper liberal shibboleths.

Is there hope for a moral and religious renaissance in the U.S.? I fear not. But then despair has always been precursor to true moral reawakenings. The only question is whether with the current problems of terrorism and Islam's assault on the West and the U.S. in particular, do we have the breathing room to allow an awakening to occur before we into the dark night of the soul?

Only God knows.
 

Politically correct murderers. The Supreme Court has ruled against capital punishment for the mentally retarded. At first blush that sounds likes a properly compassionate thing to do, but most things don't bear up under scrutiny after the blush fades.

Ann Coulter takes on this decision in her latest column. She makes two points that bear consideration, using the recent case of Daryl Renard Atkins, a repeat violent criminal, as an example.

Consider what "retarded" means in this context. It does not mean that Atkins could not understand the difference between right and wrong. The law already accounts for that possibility with the concept of legal insanity. It does not mean he could not assist in his own defense. The law already accounts for that possibility with the concept of legal incompetence.

The second point she makes is

As far back as 1914, criminologist H.H. Goddard concluded that "25 percent to 50 percent of the people in our prisons are mentally defective and incapable of managing their affairs with ordinary prudence." Crimes of violence in particular – murder, rape and assault – are all correlated with low IQs.

Thus, the Supreme Court has now prohibited the death penalty for precisely those people who are most likely to commit death-penalty level crimes.

Somehow we (at least the liberal we) have come to consider that people with less ability on normal aptitude tests such as IQ should be less responsible for their actions, even though the law already has mechanisms to deal with diminished capacity problems.

One of my biggest bugaboos with liberals of every stripe, is their selective use of an argument. This is no different. It is illegal to use an IQ test when hiring people, it violates their civil rights. Why is it now legal to use the same test to remove their culpability in a crime? Any logic that will support that dichotomy will be convoluted at best and more than likely an outright fallacious effort.

Which brings me to my point. Liberals decide what they want to do and then find arguments to support it, even if the current argument appears to completely disavow a previous position. You see this all the time with Christian liberal thinkers as they twist the Christian scriptures into pretzels to get it to give them what they want, since it is only what they want that is important. What is missing here is consistency of thought and argument. In religion is a failed systematic theology. In politics and society it is a failed systematic logic.

I was brought up to believe that life was a whole cloth. Indeed there are those among us who argue for "holistic" objectives in areas such as health, but these same people resist holistic arguments elsewhere. Why? Because their dog won't hunt everywhere they want it to. As a result, their system of belief, their social construct, is a patchwork of contradictory positions, each targeting a particular desire or result, as if they could be compartmentalized and have no bearing on each other. Ecologist say everything is connected until you try to make the same point in a social or political setting, then they argue against their previous position. It would be sad if it weren't so deadly to our social future.

If Diogenes were alive today, I think he would be going around with his lantern looking for a man who thought through his life with a consistent logic, who held to consistent opinions across the fabric of his life. I have a feeling he would be just as unsuccessful as when he spent most of his original life looking throughout Greece for an honest man.
 

Baseball, summer nights, and boys. The Yankees are in town and a friend dropped tickets on me for tonight's game, allowing me to take my nephew to his first Major League Baseball game. Summer, baseball, and young boys. If that isn't a slice of my early memories and a piece of Americana, I don't know what is.

Well we went, and the Orioles won. For Nick's first game it was an exciting contest, a titanic struggle even. The hated Yankees, who brought legions of their fans to the yard, went ahead by two runs in the top of the first and things looked bleak. But, in keeping with the scrappy nature of this year's team, the Orioles came back in the bottom of the inning and took the lead. They did it with two outs, using two home runs interspersed with a single.

The game went on like that throughout the evening, first the Yankees pulling ahead and then the Orioles responding. There were five home runs and numerous lead changes until, in the bottom of the ninth using a single, a stolen base, and another single, the Orioles sent their fans home happy and the Yankee throng dejected. We had knocked the hated Yankees out of first place and all was right with the world.

Our seats were in the bleachers (what better place for a boy's first game) and we were surrounded by a mix of Oriole and Yankee fans. There was a lot of good natured ribbing that went on as the emotions ebbed and flowed with ups and downs of the game.

Last week I talked about what I like about sports, and I reflected on the sharing of the experience with a group of friends and how the sport moment adds a unique dimension to the time we spend with friends. It was like that last night. Nick doesn't play baseball, and had never been to a game on any level, but he enjoyed everything last night: the stadium, the players, the crowd, the food, and of course my company. It was a friendship moment, enriched by the energy of a sporting event.

There were a number of family and friendship groups seated around us and over the course of the game we all became fast friends for the evening, sharing thoughts and even getting refreshed by the kindly grandmother who liberally offered her water fan spray to anyone in need. Temperature at game time was 92 degrees and her cool misting fan was a real hit.

That is what is unique about sports. I know of few other situations where a group of strangers can create such an immediate and friendly bond. It may only have lasted for the evening, but it was real, and warm, and a wonderfully enriching experience. It is times like that when the problems of terrorism and the mess in Wall Street fade into the background, and for an evening our souls find a respite from all the tribulations we face. Thank you God.
 

In, out, or just politically incorrect. For some time the Palestinians have been politically correct and Israel and Jews in general have been out, not politically incorrect, just out. However, it has been politically correct to blame Israel for everything wrong in the Middle East, while at the same time disavowing any taint of Anti-Semitism.

In a recent column in MotherJones.com, highlighted by Andrew Sullivan, Todd Gitlin addresses the return of the "rough beast". The title to his article reminds me of Yeats' poem, The Second Coming in which a "rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” Though Yeats posed it as a question, I, along with Gitlin, see it as an answer: anti-Semitism, this time in the hearts of the Palestinians, codified in the beast of radical Islam and its fellow travelers.

 It is those fellow travelers that Todd Gitlin addresses. He remembers an encounter at Berkeley in 1991, where during an anti-Gulf War rally a student leader of a radical group shocked him by

spitting out venomously, "You Jews, I know your names, I know where you live."

The telling point is what Gitlin says next

The faculty and students in attendance sat stiffly and said nothing. Embarrassed? Frightened? Or worse -- thinking that it wasn't time to tackle this issue, that it was off the agenda, an inconvenience. 

Well, he was in attendance. What did he think? He doesn't address that but goes on to lament the failure of students, and student movements to 

have the responsibility of knowing things, of thinking and discerning, of studying. A student movement should maintain the highest of standards, not ape the formulas of its elders or outdo them in virulence.

Coming from a liberal background, maybe Gitlin has failed to notice, since most student "movements" have championed liberal causes, that students have rarely, if ever, known, thought, discerned, studied, and maintained even poor standards, much less high standards. What he has glommed onto, because a shot across his bow has woken him from his uncritical slumber, is that there is a problem. What maybe he has yet to see is that the problem is endemic and has been for some time, not just in student movements, but in the left in general. He comes close in

The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism was "the socialism of fools." What we witness now is the progressivism of fools. It is a recrudescence of everything that costs the left its moral edge. 

Anti-Semitism makes a good canary for the coal mine of intellectual honesty, but it is not unique in the sins of the left nor the only noxious fumes in the mine. Gitlin is concerned, but he has yet to see that the left lost any moral edge it previously had a long time ago, thinking the problem is only recent and related to Anti-Semitism. However,  that hasn't stopped the left from wielding its blunt blade with destructive and often callous indifference across the breadth of our shared social fabric. Until now, for him. Maybe some of the left is finally waking up and seeing the dead canaries laying around them.

Don't confuse me with the facts. Michael Medved recently railed against honesty falling in the face of political correctness. In one section he tells the story of Anthony Bressan, a teacher in the high school in Pulsbo, Washington. It seems Mr. Bessan had a very popular class entitled "The Vietnam Experience" in which regaled his students with his exploits during the war, including being wounded twice. It wasn't the personal history that started the inquiry by the local American Legion Post, but his statements that American troops regularly engaged in atrocities, while he also included in the class graphical readings containing highly sexualized materials.

It turns out Mr. Bessan was never in the military and never in Southeast Asia. He didn't even have a the claimed Masters Degree. Everything was a lie and he resigned rather than face the music. This, as bad as it was, is not the real story. The real story, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the way his students have rallied around him and said it didn't matter if he made everything up and was basically living a lie. One student Risa Di Cicco, said (emphasis added)

Whether he did or did not serve in the military, in my eyes, is insignificant … Nothing changes the fact that Bressan's teaching touched numerous students. Lie or no lie, he impacted students in wonderful ways …"

These are the people we are trusting with the future? I wonder if that high school has a class in ethics? Someone propagates malicious lies (that fit politically correct denunciations of the military) and it is considered insignificant because of the wonderful, emotional, politically correct feelings that he engendered.

To paraphrase a famous aphorism, there are lies, damned lies, and political correctness.

Institutionalizing sin. As a Christian, I have always understood sex outside of marriage as sin, whether heterosexual or homosexual. With the efforts to create homosexual marriage (an oxymoron if ever there was one) making headway in our culture, the chief impediment to biblically unacceptable sexual behavior becoming normative will fall.

This came to my attention because Andrew Sullivan is all excited over the fact that an article in the Boston Globe has gubernatorial candidate Robert Reich announcing that he supports the right of gays and lesbians to marry. He sees it as a "civil rights" issue. 

Turning the language of ethics on its head David Smith, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, said.

He deserves enormous credit for taking such a principled position. 'This is a refreshing change.

My question is what principals? It would appear that those who oppose this direction, even if they do so because of the demands of their faith, are not principled. That is wrong. However, the historic views of the Judeo-Christian faith, in regards to acceptable sexual behavior, are being swept aside, and those who continue to hold to them (albeit as principled believers) are seen as anachronistic at best and repressive homophobes at worst.

We are seeing the Talibanation of all serious religious belief, especially as it relates to sexuality. If your beliefs contradict someone else's sexual needs or desires then too bad. If you try to enforce your views on the shared social structure (something every social group or religious group has a right to do when done openly and above board), even if you are expressing your constitutional rights of free speech and the free exercise of religion, too bad. You will be considered evil, as evil as the Taliban and cut off or maybe even imprisoned, since your speech has been reclassified as hate speech.

The end of the Book of Judges was one of the most corrupt periods in the history of ancient Israel. This corruption was aptly defined by a succinct statement in Judges 21:25, "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes." That about says it, doesn't it?
 

The ebb and flow of life. One of the worst things about being in business for yourself is that it is often very hard to control your workload, unless you don't want much of a workload. The more you try to do, the more there is to do and once you get on the tiger, the more you have to do to stay caught up.

On of the reasons people say they like working for themselves is that they can control their work time. If they need to do something in the middle of the day, they can. While that is true the work still needs to get done, and the deadlines are still there. Sometimes, when you are working for more than one client, the deadlines coincide closely enough that life becomes totally crazy for a few days or a few weeks.

One of the advantages of working a regular job for regular hours is that you can schedule your life and generally the time division between when is work and when is my time is easy to see. Self-employment's time division is fluid and in a sense you are always on the clock.

Initially I was not sure if it is related to age or tiredness (lack of energy), which age exacerbates. I noticed that as I get older it is harder to juggle all of those deadlines and keep the details sorted out. However, it appears that the more energy I have, the easier it is to deal with these things,  so lately I have been inclined to think that it is the effect of age on energy, rather than anything else that is the problem. As a result, in order to be as productive as possible as we grow older, it seems to be very important to learn how to husband our energy reserves and not to spend them foolishly.

Just like the days are gone when I can eat anything and not gain weight, the days are gone when I can just go as long or hard as I want and be able to do it again the next day. No, these days I have to choose my battles.

It is not just work that has made these energy limitations abundantly clear to me recently. It is the presence of a 12 year old boy (my sister's youngest) who is visiting me for a month. His non-stop, always on the go energy level has left me a bit exhausted just watching him.