[I've had a lot of requests for the SILENT AMERICA essays, which did not survive the move from the old site very well.

The one I get the most requests to re-post -- by far -- is TRIBES. TRIBES was written immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, and tales of appalling circumstances in New Orleans -- specifically in the Superdome -- were flying loose everywhere. A lot of those events turned out not to have happened, but the essentials remain the same: I was furious -- just plain seeing-red livid -- at some of the charges that were being hurled, and I decided to say something about what I was feeling in the middle of these accusations and recriminations.

This is likely the most controversial thing I have written.  Some people have called it racist. It is precisely, continuously and emphatically anti-racist... but that card has to be played when it's the only card you hold. And there is a language warning for this one -- not something I generally require. Anyway, here it is: back by popular demand. ] 

I’m generally an optimist, and it’s been my pleasure to be able to write mostly about the good and the noble things in our lives. But the events in the Gulf – of Mexico – have brought to a head a summer and a year that has been getting progressively uglier and more painful to watch. 

 Who can not see the way the country has changed, not since 9/11, but before that – since the 2000 election? Who cannot feel the split, the division, that rips like a shredding sail on a broken mast, canvas tearing like the sound of musketry, as the rigging falls to the deck?

 This breaks my heart. It just breaks my heart into little pieces. I have said less and less as I see more and more, because deep in my core I still don’t want to believe that some Americans could willfully and consistently do such destructive things out of such petty and base motivations, things which make in time will make the horrors of New Orleans look like a flea circus in a small tent, with the much larger carnival raging unseen in the background.

 I’ve taken sides in these essays, obviously – that’s what I do. But I have never, until now, felt the need to take the gloves off and really let fly. I always feared I would regret it, later. I still do. Only now, I fear I will regret it worse if I do not.

 So now we must look at Tribes, and the horrible, destructive, civilization-destroying tribalism that this nation once so spectacularly renounced, renounced so loudly and so clearly that it became the defining element of what it meant to be an American.

Now please pay attention to this, because I’m not going to state it again, and if you don’t hear it now much mischief will follow:

I believe that the human animal – the raw material of our physical bodies – is essentially interchangeable. By this I mean that I could take the children of Fallujah and turn them all into Astronauts, convert Jewish babies into fanatical, mass-murdering SS guards, and shake a generation of the poorest Voodoo-worshippers in Haiti into a cadre of top-flight nuclear physicists, chemical engineers and computer scientists.

Race has nothing to do with this – nothing. The mobs of murdering Hutus and swarms of slaughtering Serbs are as different racially as it is possible to be, and they are cut from precisely the same cloth.

I know this is so because there have been murdering scumbags of every stripe and color in the long history of the human race – which is depressing – and that these animals, at any given time, represent only a small percentage of the majority of people, also of every stripe and color – which is not. There is no corner on virtue, and no outpost of depravity. Human hearts are indistinguishable and interchangeable. Anyone who claims otherwise is, without further argument or statements necessary, a complete God-damned idiot.

Now, with that said – have we all heard that loud and clear? – there are light-years of difference in how various Tribes will behave.

Only a few minutes ago, I had the delightful opportunity to read the comment of a fellow who said he wished that white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself could have been herded into the Superdome Concentration Camp to see how much we like it.  Absent, of course, was the fundamental truth of what he plainly does not have the eyes or the imagination to see, namely, that if the Superdome had been filled with white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself, it would not have been a refinery of horror, but rather a citadel of hope and order and restraint and compassion. 

That has nothing to do with me being white. If the blacks and Hispanics and Jews and gays that I work with and associate with were there with me, it would have been that much better. That’s because the people I associate with – my Tribe – consists not of blacks and whites and gays and Hispanics and Asians, but of individuals who do not rape, murder, or steal. My Tribe consists of people who know that sometimes bad things happen, and that these are an opportunity to show ourselves what we are made of.  My people go into burning buildings. My Tribe consists of organizers and self-starters, proud and self-reliant people who do not need to be told what to do in a crisis. My Tribe is not fearless; they are something better. They are courageous. My Tribe is honorable, and decent, and kind, and inventive. My Tribe knows how to give orders, and how to follow them. My Tribe knows enough about how the world works to figure out ways to boil water, ration food, repair structures, build and maintain makeshift latrines, and care for the wounded and the dead with respect and compassion.

There are some things my Tribe is not good at at all. My Tribe doesn’t make excuses. My Tribe will analyze failure and assign blame, but that is to make sure that we do better next time, and we never, ever waste valuable energy and time doing so while people are still in danger.  My Tribe says, and in their heart completely believes that it’s the other guy that’s the hero.  My Tribe does not believe that a single Man can cause, prevent or steer Hurricanes, and my Tribe does not and has never made someone else responsible for their own safety, and that of their loved ones.

My Tribe doesn’t fire on people risking their lives, coming to help us. My Tribe doesn’t curse such people because they arrived on Day Four, when we felt they should have been here before breakfast on Day One. We are grateful, not to say indebted, that they have come at all. My Tribe can’t eat Nike’s and we don’t know how to feed seven on a wide-screen TV. My Tribe doesn’t give a sweet God Damn about what color the looters are, or what color the rescuers are, because we can plainly see before our very eyes that both those Tribes have colors enough to cover everyone in glory or in shame. My Tribe doesn’t see black and white skins. My Tribe only sees black and white hats, and the hat we choose to wear is the most personal decision we can make.

That’s the other thing, too – the most important thing. My Tribe thinks that while you are born into a Tribe, you do not have to stay there. Good people can  join bad Tribes, and bad people can choose good ones.  My Tribe thinks you choose your Tribe.  That, more than anything, is what makes my Tribe unique. 

I am so utterly and unabashedly proud of my Tribe,  that my words haunt and mock me for their pale weakness and shameful inadequacy.

Membership in my Tribe is not free.

I have been the first person at four accident scenes. I have crawled into overturned cars on country roads, cars whose wheels were still spinning, and gone on hands and knees through broken glass to comfort strangers while uniformed policemen stood around outside and told jokes. I have put my triple-knit polyester chauffeur’s blazer over an elderly black woman hit by a bus and used my belt as a tourniquet to slow the dark spread of blood widening beneath her badly broken leg, and been amazed, every time, at how the sounds of approaching sirens seems to come almost before I have time to hold her hand and tell her she’s gonna be just fine.

I say this not to glorify myself – on the contrary. I am embarrassed to write such things. I am a pampered and lazy Hollywood TV editor who gets paid insane sums of money to do a cake job while much better people than me do this every day, for peanuts. There is nothing remotely heroic about me. I simply do what millions and millions and millions of my fellow Americans do every day, in ways large and small. They step up to the plate, not because they want to be heroes, but because someone has to do it.  These simple people donate their time, their money, their food, their cars and their houses every single day, and ask and expect nothing in return, while a few miles away from me in Brentwood millionaire movie stars throw fabulous parties to remind each other how swell they are, then waltz out into their chauffeured limos with their tens or hundreds of millions of dollars firmly in place, feeling good that they had the chance to really make a difference by raising awareness of whichever cause they feel will most make up for their feelings of inadequacy and guilt by showing both themselves and us just how much better people they really are. 

What kind of money could Barbara and Martin and Tim and Susan and Gwenneth and George and Steven and Viggo and Linda and Harvey and Brad and Angelina and Ben and all the rest – how much could they really put together, if they actually believed what they say  – not to mention the cash available to the Malodorous Michigan Manatee of Mendacity? What kind of check could they write? $500 million would be less than 10% of their combined wealth. That money could take every poor person in LA county and put them into much nicer apartments than the one I live in. They could, at a stroke, shame the President, the Congress, and the evil NeoCon warmongers by putting every displaced person in New Orleans in a Marriott for a year. They claim this is the kind of better human they have evolved into.

Why don’t they do it?

They don’t do it because that Tribe worships the golden statue of themselves, that’s why. A church-going pharmacist in Des Moines would be ashamed of herself for giving only 10% of her modest salary.  But Sean Penn can take himself, an entourage and a personal photographer – that’s three or four people in a four-person boat – and show us all how incredibly big and down-home he is by sailing off a few feet to rescue people, before the boat sinks from the incompetence of failing to put in the drainage plug. He wore a very nice white flak vest, instead of the passé orange life preserver, because getting shot at is a lot more macho looking, if a million or so times less likely, than drowning because you went out into the water with a lead vest rather than a life vest. It’s a scene in the trailer that runs incessantly in their heads: In a world run by evil corporations, a rebel who plays by his own rules starts a deadly game of cat and mouse with an all-powerful conspiracy in this searing portrait of extraordinary courage in a life under siege, starring…me!

I was actually ready to publicly commend the guy, until I heard about the personal photographer.  If he wanted to help people – and that’s all – he could have paid for that boat, and a few hundred others, manned them with reasonably competent recreational boaters, and sent out a flotilla. But no. It’s not about having people saved. It’s about something else entirely. It’s about having people saved by Sean Penn.  That’s when I realized that whether it’s the Murderous Regime in Iraq, or the Murderous Regime in Iran, or the Murderous Storm in Louisiana…ultimately, it’s all about Sean Penn.  Peace Be Upon Him.

But thank God we have people like him, and the rest of that vain, useless, smug, self-centered, incompetent, insecure and thoroughly broken Tribe to point out the error of our ways.

I hate those sons of bitches with all of my heart. And the fact that so much of our society has come to worship these shallow, egomaniacal dolts says a lot about where we are, and none of it is good.

Now this next point is so obvious, so simple and so self-evident that there is no way the deep thinkers of the far left will possibly be able to see it.

Let’s not talk about Black and White tribes… I know more pathetic, hateful, racists and more decent, capable and kind people of both colors for that to make any sense at all. Do you not? Do you not know corrupt, ignorant, violent people, both black and white, to cure you of this elementary idiocy? Have you not met and talked and laughed with people who were funny, decent, upright, honest and honorable of every shade so that the very idea of racial politics should just seem like a desperate and divisive and just plain evil tactic to hold power?

If such a thing is not self-evident to you, please get off my property. Right now. I should tell you I own a gun and I know how to use it.  I assure you that the pleasure I would take in shooting you would be temporary, minimal, and deeply regretted later.

Now, for the rest of you, let’s get past Republican and Democrat, Red and Blue, too. Let’s talk about these two Tribes: Pink, the color of bunny ears, and Grey, the color of a mechanical pencil lead.

I live in both worlds. In entertainment, everything is Pink, the color of Angelyne’s Stingray – it’s exciting and dynamic and glamorous.  I’m also a pilot, and I know honest-to-God rocket scientists, and combat flight crews Special Ops guys and am proud and deeply honored to call them my friends.

The Pink Tribe is all about feeling good: feeling good about yourself! Sexually, emotionally, artistically – nothing is off limits, nothing is forbidden, convention is fossilized insanity and everybody gets to do their own thing without regard to consequences, reality, or natural law. We all have our own reality – one small personal reality is called “science,” say – and we Make Our Own Luck and we Visualize Good Things and There Are No Coincidences and Everything Happens for a Reason and You Can Be Whatever You Want to Be and we all have Special Psychic Powers and if something Bad should happen it’s because Someone Bad Made It Happen. A Spell, perhaps.

The Pink Tribe motto, in fact, is the ultimate Zen Koan, the sound of one hand clapping: EVERYBODY IS SPECIAL.

Then, in the other corner, there is the Grey Tribe – the grey of reinforced concrete. This is a Tribe where emotion is repressed because Emotion Clouds Judgment.  This is the world of Quadratic Equations and Stress Risers and Loads Torsional, Compressive and Tensile, a place where Reality Can Ruin Your Best Day, the place where Murphy mercilessly picks off the Weak and the Incompetent, where the Speed Limit is 186,282.36 mph, where every bridge has a Failure Load and levees come in 50 year, 100 year and 1000 Year Flood Flavors. 

The Grey Tribe motto is, near as I can tell, THINGS BREAK SOMETIMES AND PLEASE DON’T LET IT BE MY BRIDGE.

Now, when things are going swimmingly, when the End of History has arrived, as it did in the 90’s, having a Pink president  (careful!) is no big deal. In fact, it’s a downright advantage. He can be a goodwill ambassador, and charm the pants (you heard me!)  off of foreign dignitaries and have everyone cooing and gushing about how swell Americans are once the fascists are out of power.

Now, unfortunately for Pink Power, there remain in the world a few people not impressed by this attitude.

Not long ago, National Geographic ran a really first-rate, 3-hour documentary called INSIDE 9/11, as perfect an example as you could possibly want of the power of a real documentary to enlighten and inform without taking sides.

Watching it was horrible, especially for people like me, because we feel like if we had only known what was going on we could have done something about it.

A few weeks ago, a reader was kind enough to send me a link about a theory and seminar called The Bulletproof Mind, written by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. Just the small blurb I read enlarged my mind by an order of magnitude, because it clarified many of the confusing things I have been feeling as so much of the country plunges deeper into irresponsibility, fantasy, bitterness and delusion.

I excerpt a small portion of it here, without permission, in the hope that those of you who are serious about surviving things like Katrina will go here and buy it.

Lt. Colonel Grossman, a far better man than me, a man who does things I only talk about, writes in his introduction to The Bulletproof Mind:

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me: “Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.”

This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another.

Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million total Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin’s egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

“Then there are the wolves,” the old war veteran said, “and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.” Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

“Then there are sheepdogs,” he went on, “and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” Or, as a sign in one California law enforcement agency put it, “We intimidate those who intimidate others.”

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath–a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.

He continues:

Let me expand on this old soldier’s excellent model of the sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial; that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids’ schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid’s school. Our children are dozens of times more likely to be killed, and thousands of times more likely to be seriously injured, by school violence than by school fires, but the sheep’s only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their children is just too hard, so they choose the path of denial.

The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog that intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours.

Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn’t tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, “Baa.” Until the wolf shows up. Then the entire flock tries desperately to hide behind one lonely sheepdog. As Kipling said in his poem about “Tommy” the British soldier:

Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be. Also understand that a sheepdog is a funny critter: He is always sniffing around out on the perimeter, checking the breeze, barking at things that go bump in the night, and yearning for a righteous battle. That is, the young sheepdogs yearn for a righteous battle. The old sheepdogs are a little older and wiser, but they move to the sound of the guns when needed right along with the young ones.

Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said, “Thank God I wasn’t on one of those planes.” The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, “Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a difference.” When you are truly transformed into a warrior and have truly invested yourself into warriorhood, you want to be there. You want to be able to make a difference.

While there is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior, he does have one real advantage — only one. He is able to survive and thrive in an environment that destroys 98 percent of the population.

[Emphasis mine – BW]

And that is how I felt watching every minute of that 3 hour documentary.

I could have done something.

If I had known, if I had only known, I could have run over that evil, sick  son of a bitch Mohammed Atta in the parking lot. I could have just walked into their little apartment in Florida and just shot them all, and try to get away with, and be okay if I didn’t. I could have been on those airplanes. They only had box cutters, for the love of God! Those seat cushions have straps on the back for floatation; they’d make excellent shields against a goddam two inch blade. Ladies, listen carefully…when I say go, you throw your shoes and cell phones and these little liquor bottles and cushions and whatever you can, just throw them right in the face of these cocksuckers and guys, when we get up there we need to kill them, fast, just break their fucking necks, just stomp on their heads until they are dead, because I know how to land a goddam airplane and…and…

Now of course, right at this moment there are people without honor or courage who read that and think this is all one big jerk-off chickenhawk fantasy and on some level I guess it is. All I can tell you is that watching that show, I wished to God I had been on one of those planes, asking only that we knew what only Flight 93 knew, and that was the fate that was waiting for us if we did nothing.

Because everybody dies. Even liberals. And all I can say is that I believe in my heart that I would rather die for something bigger than myself than lead a life where nothing is more important than me.  I admit freely that were I actually there I might freeze up, and wet my pants, and hide behind a stewardess, because you can never really know until you are there. But my times on the highways late at night, and with the only engine silent at 9000 feet over the South Georgia pine forests and at 400 feet climbing out of Prescott Arizona on Christmas day reassure me, a little, that perhaps I might do okay. Just as well as a common person, a common American person in a crisis – that’s all I pray for 

Much has been said regarding how much more massive an event Katrina is relative to lower Manhattan. But the fact remains that firemen went up the stairs when people were coming down, and one ordinary group of people on an ordinary flight on an ordinary day defeated the very best that the global terror network could put together. Our ladies junior varsity squad whipped the living shit out of their Super Bowl A-team over Pennsylvania that day, and they did it because for one brief shining moment the enough passengers on that airplane went Grey.

And in Louisiana last week the governor cried and the mayor blamed everyone but himself, and half the country bought every single stinking Pink lie about global warming and missing National Guard units and blamed the sheepdogs while the wolves raped and pillaged and looted everything in sight.

Hundreds of New York firemen and policemen never came home,  never came home, but New Orleans Police Chief P. Edwin Compass III said, of his men, “If I put you out on the street and made you get into gun battles all day with no place to urinate and no place to defecate, I don’t think you’d be too happy either… Our vehicles can’t get any gas. The water in the street is contaminated. My officers are walking around in wet shoes.”

Well, Chief, I’m sorry your men’s feet are wet, but getting their feet wet is part of their fucking job.  New York’s Finest aren’t complaining about wet feet or places to pee because they died doing their jobs.  They were sheepdogs.

In contrast, we saw video of New Orleans finest helping themselves to the items on the shelves at WalMart.

So, on one hand, we have a very blue city – New York – confronted, out of the clear morning of a perfect fall day, with no warning – with a terror attack, and they march toward the sounds of screams and falling bodies and die by the hundreds. One the other hand, we have New Orleans law enforcement – also blue – whining about wet shoes and helping themselves to the happy period of lawlessness that followed an event that had been expected for no less than seventy-two hours.

In New York, we had a governor who got every available resource on the ground as fast as it could get there, and in Louisiana we have a governor who cried. Governor, your job is to not cry. Your job is to be strong. We have plenty of civilians crying. You want to cry, cry in the car on the way home like everybody else did four years ago.

In New Orleans we have a mayor who left some 400-500 buses sitting fueled and underwater in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool saying that evil white conservative America was selling out his people within 24 hours of the catastrophe, from and safe and dry and adequately toileted location, while four years ago we had a Mayor who ran to the site of the disaster so quickly it is a full-blown miracle he was not killed when a building collapsed literally on top of his magnificent, combed-over head.

Now, much has been made of the fact that Ray Nagin is an incompetent, race-baiting black man, and Rudy Giuliani, who was neither incompetent nor race-baiting, is white. Also, feminists are upset that people dare attack Governor Blanco because she is incompetent, weak, indecisive, and also a women.  And no doubt there are salivating long-haired, short-cortexed idiots just waiting for this to be over so they can sail into the comments section and tell me what a racist and misogynist I am.

Well, here’s the news flash: Nagin isn’t incompetent because he’s black. He’s incompetent because he’s incompetent. Condoleeza Rice is black. Colin Powell is black. Ted Kennedy, a man well-acquainted with rising water crises is as white as they come. Kennedy is incompetent; Rice and Powell are two of the most competent people on the planet.

This is about tribes, all right: not black and white tribes, but rather a battle between the capable and the culpable. 

Same holds for Governor Blanco. She’s not weak because she’s a woman, or because she’s a Democrat,. She’s weak and indecisive because that is the individual she is. I wish history could work with variables: I’d love to see what Margaret Thatcher would have done in such a case. It would not only have been better, it would have been good.  That woman was tough. She could be Grey as granite. And, for this, the Pink Tribe despises her.

Here is the Grey philosophy I try to live by:

Sometimes, Bad Things Happen. Some things are beyond my control, beyond the control of the smartest and best people we have, even beyond the control of the simpering, sub-human village idiot from Texas.

Hurricanes come. They have come for all of human history, and more are coming. Barbarians also come to steal or destroy what they cannot make themselves, and they, like human tempests, have swept a path of destruction through civilization since before history was written on clay tablets on the banks of the Euphrates 

I am not a wolf. I have never harmed a person in my life. But I am not a sheep, either. I know these forces are out there, and wishing it were not so will not only not make them go away – it will rob me of my chance to kick their ass when they show up.

I am a sheepdog. Police officers and elected officials get paid to be sheepdogs. Sheepdogs don’t cry, and they don’t complain about wet feet, and they don’t wail about conspiracies while waiting for the help that they themselves are sworn to provide.

Also, unlike so many in the ‘reality-based’ community, I do not believe in the supernatural. For instance, I don’t believe that a single god-king can summon storms, hypnotize entire populations and be the focus for evil in the world. Many people refer to Iraq as George Bush’s war, a charge I find shockingly unfair. I voted for him in 2004, and I support that war in earnest. In future billboards, I would like to be mentioned as having Kids Die in George Bush and Bill Whittle’s War for Oil, and I expect the new crop of MoveOn  bumper stickers to say DEFEND AMERICA: STOP BUSH AND WHITTLE.  I’m tired of being left out of this. George Bush did not take over the White House with a six-shooter; people voted him into office with the biggest number of votes in American history. I’m one of those people, and damn you liberal cheapskate sons of bitches, I demand my equal time.    

On the subject of disasters man-made and natural, one more thing from INSIDE 9/11 rings a powerful bell with me. At the very end, as Osama makes his way out of Afghanistan and into hiding, he tells an Al Jezeera reporter his motivations for the 9/11 attack.  In his own words, to the friendly folks back home, he explains that his goal was to hurt America so badly that we would have no choice but to go after him and start the world-wide jihad that would result in him becoming the new Caliph, ruling from his recently completed palace outside Kandahar.  He had seen much of the Pink tribe in his formative years, seen weakness and retreat in places like Somalia. He thought he had our number but he made the mistake of having perhaps the least Pink individual in modern history in the White House.  He made a worse mistake in flying his murdering deathbots into a town that looked Pink, that was painted Pink from head to toe, but whose foundation was rock-solid granite grey.

If I had gotten my 2000 voting wish and Al Gore had been president that day, would he have been Grey enough to knock that entire regime over and carry the fight to the rest of the region? Or would he have issued Stern Warnings and Worked With Our Allies and gotten the UN to Issue a Major Ultimatum?

I don’t know.

But I do know, that there, in his own words, the wolf said why he did what he did: he wanted to provoke War with the US, and would do whatever was necessary to accomplish it. And if we had not given him this war, he would have kept striking until he got what he was looking for. Nothing about US foreign policy, no word about injustice for the Palestinians or Evil Corporations or any of that. No, he said he wanted to start a war with the US. And so he has it. And he would have done whatever he had to do to get it.

Now, when Pink Tribesmen say that these people can be reasoned with, they are doing what sheep do: living in denial.

Because to say we are responsible for the terrorists in the world is a way to say we can control this wolf. We made him. All we have to do is act differently and he will go away. It’s complete moral cowardice, of course – but it’s an understandable one. It’s denial, because if all the sins are ours then all we must do is repent and the wolf will go away.

But that’s not what the wolf says. The wolf is not interested in what we do. He does not spare little lambs because they rub up against his leg and make cooing sounds. The wolf want to swallow us whole. He wants the fight. He wants the war and the conflict. And he will keep on huffing and puffing until one of three things happen: We show him our throat, for him to rip out, or we convert to Islam and become part of his Caliphate, or we head out into the forest with a shotgun and blow his fucking head off.

I made my decision by about 8:00 eastern on September 11^th, 2001. I have never regretted it.

It takes courage to fight oncoming storms. Courage.

Courage isn’t free. It is taught, taught by certain tribes who have been around enough and seen enough incoming storms to know what one looks like.  And I think the people of this nation, and those of New Orleans, specifically, desire and deserve some fundamental lessons in courage.

Because we are going to need it.

62 Comments

I am one of those people who was happy to see the International Olympic Committee shut out the Chicago bid. I know that people on the Left accuse me of rooting against my country, but — as usual — the people on the Left are wrong. I wasn’t even rooting against a President I do not generally admire, although I was glad to see him humiliated publicly in this fashion.

How can you square these statements?

Well, I feel that Barack Obama has shown – many more times than I needed to reach a conclusion on the subject — that he believes that there is no problem so intractable that it cannot be remedied by his personal intervention and a jolly good oration, which of course will reference the Miracle of his Rise to show that if only we would ______ then  ______ would finally be able to see the _____ of its ways and we’d all be able to ______ at long last.

This Olympic fiasco, I hoped, would be embarrassing enough and pointed enough to provide a clear data point that this is not always the case, and this lesson, had it sunk in,  would come at very small cost to America. After all, the loss of the Olympics in a city is considerably less painful than losing the city itself… which is where this kind of naive ego-centrism can lead us when dealing with ruthlessly self-interested regimes like Iran, Russia and North Korea — expanding nuclear powers all.

Barack Obama is not accustomed to getting the kind of faceful of egg he was given at Copenhagen. I had hoped that this would be enough to perhaps persuade him to look at the results rather than the desire, and perhaps conclude that there is almost nothing — not even a really good speech — that can persuade people into acting against their own self interest, and that he might perhaps reflect upon the fact that instead of Oprah and the First Lady, Chicago would have better been served in my friend Scott Ott’s words, by sending “traffic flow specialists, civic engineers, architects, economists… all the experts needed to convince the IOC that Chicago was up for the task.”

In other words, lead instead of cheerlead. But this President seems incapable of doing that. I don’t know how many days he has spent actually behind the desk in the Oval Office as — you know — Chief Executive, but given the number of town halls, events, ceremonies and other on-camera activities I would be willing to bet the number is not large.

Anyway, that was my hope: that humiliation on the cheap might persuade The World’s Smartest Politician to show some intelligence and change his mind based upon the evidence, the way his presecessor, The Greatest Moron in the History of The World, did when confronting a failing strategery in Iraq. That hope lasted for all of a few days. Now we see 150 doctors wearing white lab coats assembled to help Barack Obama give another career-saving speech, this time trying to get the 93% of Americans who are fundamanetally happy with their health care to act against their own self interests.

And by having them wear white lab coats, you see, he is making sure we realize they are doctors.  But I remain confused. Couldn’t they also be lab technicians? Perhaps they need to wear that reflector thing on their foreheads. Damn it, no — Dentists wear those too, and no one would be persuaded to give up their current insurance just because a hundred and fifty dentists wearing white lab coats and reflectors nod in agreement. What they should have had was stethoscopes around their necks! That would have gotten this bill passed!

And so it goes. Yet another speech, with props appropriate for a fourth grade show and tell, to sell the rubes on something they seem unwilling to want to buy. And another appeal to oratory in place of substance. And meanwhile, out at the edge of the campfire’s glow, lean and cruel wolves circle red-eyed and hungry, watching and learning.

[A few days before this was posted a spammer discovered my comment stream -- hooray!  This site is getting hit with about 500 spam messages a DAY, directly into the comments. I am sorting them out as quickly as I can, so if your comment has been "held for moderation" by the Invisible Word Press Sargeant-at-Arms, it may be taking somewhat longer than usual for me to find it and approve it.  If you have ever lived in the South and know what "kudzu" is, then you can appreciate my problem. -- BW]

115 Comments

[It's taken me a while to catch up on the Afterburners. There are some major projects in the works -- and they have been in the works for eighteen months now -- and I promise they will not disappoint.

Here I am on my favorite ground. Some of this may be familiar, but certainly the frame around it is new, and disturbing. One would think the President of the United States might be a little more historically literate concerning the country he has been elected to lead.

Also, I have had many requests for the SILENT AMERICA esssays, many of which did not survive intact from the old site. I'll start re-posting them here in between the new work. And I'll start with TRIBES, which has been requested by name several times. Until then, you can find the video link to the True Story of American Exceptionalism Afterburner here.]

The Huffington Post has gained a reputation as the premier philosophical center of the modern American Left, and it is there that we might look to find the kind of in-depth, rational argument that powers modern left-wing ideology.

 An example of this kind of reasoned discourse was found in a recent article by leading American intellect Bill Maher. Mr. Maher is outraged that people like me are outraged at a statement made by the President of the United States.

Mr. Obama, while attending a European summit earlier this year, was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. The President of the United States replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Liberal intellectual Bill Maher then went on write, “Yes, our so-called president actually said people in other countries might like their countries better. I was so shocked I nearly dropped the Bible I was using to help me masturbate into my gun.”

Now even those of us without the towering intellects of Barack Obama and Bill Maher can see that that both men are suffering from a simple lapse in comprehension. The question wasn’t whether or not he believed in American patriotism – that is, the love of one’s country.  Of course the British and the Greeks love their country. I love my country. I understand this emotion completely, and I think it’s great to have pride in who you are. But that wasn’t the question. The question was, do you believe America to be “exceptional.”

Bill Maher and Barack Obama say no. I say, yes it is, and here’s why:

Let’s examine four international areas of competition to see if there’s any way in which America can be defined as exceptional: Militarily, economically, scientifically, and culturally.  There’s the challenge. Ready?  My God, this is going to be so easy and so much fun…

Okay, Militarily…

Throughout history, certain exceptional nations have dominated the world militarily. Egypt, Rome, The Mongols, Spain, France, Britain, and America’s military dominance since World War II certainly puts it in that category. But the American military exceptionalism is completely different both in terms of relative power, and more importantly, in terms of the use of that power.  

At the end of 1945, only two military powers of any consequence remained after the ruin of the World War: the United States, and the Soviet Union, and while the Soviets had large numbers of troops and tanks, they had no navy and no strategic air force to speak of. On the other hand, the United States possessed, intact, the most awe-inspiring, battle-hardened navy the world had ever seen. It possessed sky-darkening clouds of B-29 strategic bombers. And it possessed, alone, the atomic bomb and the will to use it.

Had we been like any other power in the history of the world, the United States of America would have used that monopoly on absolute military supremacy to have planted its flag anywhere it wanted and no one would have been able to do a thing about it.

But what did America do with this once-in-all-of-history military advantage?  We scrapped the ships, drove steel bars through the wings of the priceless bombers, and began the largest de-militarization in the history of the world.  Oh, and we sent billions of 1940’s dollars – an almost unimaginable sum – to our defeated mortal adversaries to get them back on their feet.

And in all of the years since then, despite what Michael Moore may want you to believe from the comfort of his editing room, the United States has deployed in response to aggression – not to cause it. Berlin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Korea, Vietnam  – all of it Communist – that is to say, Leftist – aggression.

There is another military issue that need to be addressed. It is the idea of American “Imperialism.”

The fair working definition of “empire” is a group of countries ruled over by another country, and the entire point of an empire if for the ruling nation to pull resources and wealth from the subject nations.  So, is America an Empire?

Well, over what other nation does the US exercise “supreme power in governing?” Whose national parliament can we overturn at our whim? What nations in this so-called “American Imperialism” does America have ruling governors in? There are none, and everyone knows it.  We have a handful of very small territories that repeatedly vote for that status. And in those nations that voluntarily house American military bases, we find we not only do not steal the resources of the host nation, but rather pump vast amounts of money into those countries. When a country – like the Phillipines – decides it no longer wants those bases, the bases are removed. Furthermore, we pay for whatever resources we are sold. That benefits us and our trading partner. Free trade is the economic and moral antithesis of imperialism.

And just as a quick parting shot, let’s talk about a “war for oil.” Unlike the people that bandy this term around, I’ve enough about military doctrine to know what a War for Oil would like like. In a War for Oil, the US would secure the oil fields using Special Operations teams. We’d place an armored cordon around the oil fields, and then, using military convoys under overwhelming close air support, convoy the oil to Basra where it would be loaded on US tankers and escorted out of the region by American Carrier Battle Groups. And if you don’t believe that take on America’s fundamental military decency, I would refer you back to the First Gulf War, when Saddam was high-tailing it back to Iraq and the US Army sat unopposed on the precious, precious oil fields. They were ours; we won them in battle. What did this American Empire do? We put out the fires and then we went home. Again.

So what kind of empire has no sovereignty over its subject nations, deplys no governors to make it’s will felt and which puts resources into the outlying colonies, rather than pulling them in?

What kind of empire is that? An Anti-Empire, that’s what kind. America’s presence is Anti-Imperial. That has never happened before in history. That is one of a kind. That’s exceptional.

Economically, the United States – with less than five percent of the world’s population – produces 20% of it’s total economic output. You don’t find that exceptional? How about this? America, with three hundred and seven million people, produces about 14 trillion in GDP. China, with 1.3 billion, produces almost 8 trillion dollars of GDP. In other words, America produces twice the GDP of second place China, and we do it with less than 25% of their population. You don’t find that exceptional, Mr. President? I find that very exceptional. 

And just to shoot down a recurring bit of idiocy I see bandied about out there, let’s just very quickly dispose of the idea that America is rich because it steals all the wealth from the third world.

U.S. GDP, as I mentioned, is a little over 14 trillion dollars. Let’s take the GDP of a poor country – Djibouti, lets say – the not the absolute bottom, but close enough… Djibouti ranks 162 out of 180 countries in the world.

Djibouti’s GDP is a little less than 1.9 Billion dollars annually.  The GDP of the United States is 7,600 times that of Djibouti.  If we were to send the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines into Djibouti, and steal everything they made that year – everything, we just took their whole GDP – well, that would account for the first  1.2 hours of the first day of January of America’s GDP year.  In other words, the United States makes in the first hour and ten minutes of January first what Djibouti makes all year.

There has never been anything like the US economy. No one can look at the numbers I just gave and not see it as the most remarkable and exceptional wealth creation machine in history.  But it does seem at times that the President who sees nothing exceptional in America is doing his level best to remove what were the exceptional elements of the US economy – low taxes, low regulation and private initiative – and lead us straight out of this once-in-history economic miracle. Into what? I don’t know. No one knows.

Moving on. One of the common charges leveled – seemingly every week – by deep thinkers like Bill Maher, Janeane Garofolo, Michael Moore and other left-wing idols – is that America is a stupid country. In fact, if you listen to these guys, American’s are not just stupid – we are, literally, according to them, the stupidest people in the world. 

Is that true? How does America fare scientifically?

Each year, scientists all around the world write research papers. These papers produce scientific citations. It’s fair to call these citations “units” of science, that is, a measure of how much ground-breaking science is being performed.

Now the last time I checked, China came in sixth, preceeded by France, England, Germany and Japan. Japan, at number, had six and a half million citations in a ten year period.

During that time the United States produced 39,027,838 – more than six times as many as the runner up.  Six times as many as number 2.  Mr. Maher, I’m not even talking to you any more – you’re an idiot if you can’t see numbers like this. But Mr. Obama, as President of the United States, can’t you see that this is not just patriotism. Six times the number of scientific citations as the number two country, and with less than five percent of the world population… Don’t you find that even somewhat exceptional?

Let’s put this in visual terms…

All of those images of the deep structure of galaxies and nebulae from the Hubble Space Telescope are provided to the world at the expense of the American taxpayer and through American. Almost every image of the surface of Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune was sent to the world by American grad students at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech in Pasadena. The American university system is the envy of the world. Nowhere is there better science being done, and no where is there anything like the numbers of people receiving advanced scientific and engineering degrees.

One man – an American named Norman Borlaug, whose name should be sung to the rafters every day – launched what is known as the green revolution. This American agronomist first developed the high-yield, disease-resistant crops that defied the Malthusian projections of worldwide famine and single-handedly fed the entire world. Billions of people are alive today because of this American scientist.

But I can go on. Almost all of the life-saving drugs administered around the world are the product of American pharmaceutical research. Almost all.

To compare American inventive genius relative to the rest of the world, let’s go right to the heart of the modern socialist European state, Sweden. Google “Swedish inventions” and what comes up? Wikipedia has nothing – not one thing – in the 21^st century. Swedes did invent the spherical bearing in 1907 – and that’s not a trivial thing – and neither is the first practical dialysis machine, invented by Nils Alwall.

On my monitor, I had to hit “page down” key 3 times to run through the list of Swedish inventions. The list of American breakthroughs took me 69 taps of that button, and revealed – just taking one out of twenty, let’s say – Refrigeration, the electric telegraph, anesthesia, assembly line production, the airplane, the bulldozer, extragalactic astronomy, the liquid-fueled rocket,  EEG brain topography, the digital computer, nylon, ,the creation of the first Transuranium element,  nuclear weapons, the transistor, supersonic flight, the video game, cable television, radiocarbon dating, the atomic clock, the credit card, the nuclear submarine, the laser, carbon fiber, the integrated circuit, the weather satellite, the birth control pill, the communications satellite, Kevlar, the compact disc, the jumbo jet, the personal computer, email, the Heimlich maneuver, the space shuttle, the graphic user interface,  the global positioning system, and in case you missed any of that: TiVo. Oh, and parenthetically, this nation of idiots landed on the moon two generations ago, and we also mapped the human genome about a decade ahead of schedule.

Mr. President, would you not consider that exceptional scientific output for less than five percent of the world’s population?  And Bill Maher, sir… you smoke too much pot.

Culturally, I’ll just say this: look at the list of the 50 top-grossing movies of all time. There is a lot of international talent there, certainly, but every single one of them is the product of an American studio. You might object to Lord of the Rings being on that list, but the three Lord of the Rings movies cost about 450 million dollars and New Zealand doesn’t have that kind of money – nothing like it. The top 50 movies are American movies, spoken in English. 

In terms of albums sold, American Michael Jackson is the only one to sell over 100 million worldwide. The following six best selling albums are all American, with Andrew Lloyd Weber, of all people, coming in at number 8.

Compare the star power at the BAFTA’s – the British film awards, or the Greek Awards – with the Oscars. That’s not a question of the Brits or the Greeks loving their own movie stars. It’s a question of which country produces the international culture. And by every measure, it’s us. Five percent.

Let’s not belabor this any further.  As a reasonable person, based on the evidence I have presented, would you not say that the United States of America is not only exceptional in one or two of these areas, but has historically dominated all of these fields – military, economic, scientific and cultural – in a way never before matched in history.  It’s simply never happened before.

It takes lethal doses of cynicism to ignore a mountain of facts this high. I expect this kind of cynicism from Bill Maher. Bill Maher – and Michael Moore, Janeane Garofolo, and all the rest – have made a very comfortable living – well, maybe not Garofalo – by telling a small group of under-educated sycophants that they’re actually really much smarter than the rest of the rubes because they buy their tickets. But no one can seriously believe, in the face of the evidence I just laid out – that this is a stupid country. In fact, you can’t come to any reasonable conclusion other than the United States being the most exceptional country in the history of the world.

So why do they say what they say? Nihilists, you see, believe in nothing. They are hollow, soulless people, and the one thing they cannot tolerate is belief in something good. Belief in America is to them like sunlight to vampires. It makes their skin catch fire.  They cannot hear this music, and so they can’t allow you to hear it either. But don’t let them get to you. The facts are on our side, and not theirs.

You know, I can remember a time when a common citizen didn’t have to explain American greatness to the President, but rather the other way around.

I remember a President who thought of his country not as one out of 180 equally good countries, but rather as  a shining city on a hill, an exceptional place. A President who once said “After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

Mr. Obama, like all previous Presidents of the United States, you are descended from immigrants. But I believe you may be the first whose father hurtled through the darkness, towards home, then discovered he didn’t care for it much and hurtled back to where he came from. That’s the true story of the man you revere, along with the Marxist professors you claim to have sought out in college, and the radical Anti-Americans you have associated with your entire life. I fear they may have colored your judgment somewhat, sir, and I would ask that you take a look at the evidence I have presented and perhaps, next time you are asked if the country you lead is exceptional, you might perhaps nod and say, “yeah, you know what? Maybe we are.”

45 Comments

[If you'd like to watch this article in all it's Afterburnery video glory, you can find it here.]

I’d like to take just a few moments to talk about the power of Iconography.  If you happen to be a high-level Republican strategist, you’re probably saying, “the power of Ica-what-now?” If you’re a high-level Democratic strategist, you might be thinking, “Aw, crap! He’s onto us!”

 See this lovely steak dinner? Appetizing, isn’t it? Of course, if you put this in a blender and hit Puree, it comes out looking like this…

Exact same content. Different packaging. I believe the conservative message is, on balance, the most nutritious philosophical meal ever devised. But the packaging of that message has been an unmitigated disaster.

Here’s the stage from last year’s Republican National Convention. Wow. It probably took a good half hour to design, an maybe double that to build. It’s a giant square plank poking you right in the eye. Now look at last years DNC stage…

It looks like the entrance to Tomorrowland at Disney World. Look at how it’s lit! Look at those curving screens, leading the eye right up to heaven. It’s inviting, it’s warm, it’s new and exciting. If you don’t think this matters, I’m sorry to say you’re wrong. All of these elements have a profound impact on how people perceive the message. Even the choice of colors.

Now let’s just look at the power of simple shapes. Let’s take the tale of two classically simple pieces of iconography.

One line drawing conjures up a completely different set of emotions and expectations than the other one does… doesn’t it? Look at these two masterpieces of iconography. Look how simple they are. Can you begin to see how something this simple can conjure up so many images and feelings from your own childhood? The power of an icon is in its ability to evoke a subconscious emotional response. Advertising has a term for this. It’s called branding. 

During the campaign season, it’s common to try and get an icon to stand for a candidate. George W. Bush used the “W” in his two presidential runs… the W off-setting him from his father’s same-name presidency. It’s not bad. But the application of it was strictly on lawn signs and bumper-stickers. Amateur hour, by today’s standards.

Now we come to the gold standard. From a pure design standpoint, I’ve always found this to be a little infantile. But the fact is, it’s a classic: plowed fields of grain, under the sunrise of a new tomorrow… all in the shpe of the “O.” “O” for Obama, of course. But also “O” for The One. The circle. Complete and self-contained. Sunrise and prosperity within the circle of life, and outside it nothing but barren emptiness.  In terms of what it evokes it is a masterpiece, and the way the Obama team used it, and continues to use it, is absolutely brilliant.

Look at this image. It’s from the official Obama website. Notice how all of the traditional American iconography – the eagle, the stars, the flag, the motto: “e PLURIBUS UNUM – all are slowly fading out into a diffuse, heavenly glow, receding into the mists of memory, leaving only the glowing sun, the “O” pulling your eye into the future. And there are some very subtle and disturbing things here, as well. The American eagle isn’t perched, to remain here forever, but rather seems to be on the verge of flying away. The flag is falling. The stars are dissipating into the void. Our national motto: E PLURIBUS UNUM – “Out of many, One” is virtually unreadable.. . more like letters stamped in soft sand.

The only thing that is sharp and well-defined is the circle, the One, the “O.”  That is what is permanent and immovable. Everything else is fading away. You think this is an accident? Think again.

Now when George Bush was elected, the W logo was put away for four years until it was dragged out again for his second campaign. But the Obama logo is still with us. At MyBarackObama dot com, we see images of a diverse group of citizens being called to “Organize for America.” Men and women of various ages and ethnicities.

What do they have in common? Go look carefully for yourself: they’re branded.

Mybarackobama.com is run by the Democratic National Committee. The new Democratic party logo is this:

…which is great by the way, dynamic and energetic, and a far cry from this stodgy, uninspired, static, child-like thing:

But this – pardon the expression – “kickin’” Democratic party logo appears nowhere on Mybarackobama.com. However, the Obama logo is everywhere. Everywhere. 

It’s everywhere. They even tell you flat out it’s everywhere:

To the best of my knowledge, this is – again, pardon the expression – unprecedented.  I believe it is unique in the American experience to brand an individual leader. The President of the United States has a logo. Here it is:

It’s a pretty exclusive club:. Barack Obama is one of only 43 people in the history of the world authorized to use this logo. (Grover Cleveland technically being both President number 22 and 24).

The fact that we see the Obama logo attached to health care proposals means that we are seeing an individual brand – that of Barack Obama – being used alongside and in many cases in place of the logo of the President of the United States. That is interesting and I don’t like it.

 The man won the election and the right to use the Seal of the President of the United States. The fact that we continue to see the Obama logo used by the Democratic National Committee tells me that this is a perpetual campaign and that what they are branding is in fact an ideology centered around a Cult of Personality. We have seen in the past the dangers of branding an ideology with an icon. The two great totalitarian ideologies of the early 20^th century both used powerful icons to represent their ideas. I will not show those here because it would be obscene to compare them and the horror they generated – 150 million dead, no less – to what is going on here, today. That was mass murder. This is merely advertising.  We’ve just never seen this kind of thing before, in America.

The Obama logo has been powerful, but there is a weakness imbedded in that power of identity. If this logo is shorthand for all of the positives President Obama wants to project, then it can also be used as a shorthand for his negatives as well.

Lately, there has been an avalanche of anti-Obama merchandise…. Most of it centering around the ubiquitous “O”. Here in Los Angeles we have for years seen an iconic image by an artist named Shepard Fairey. A charming guy, one of whom’s collections is entitled E PLURIBUS VENOM. 

We’ve seen his famous “OBEY” poster plastered all over LA for many years. The face is based on the wrestler Andre the Giant. It’s a powerful image. Shepard’s latest work is, of course, this:

…which is so striking that it immediately became the unofficial Barack Obama poster and rapidly produced any number of parodies.

But the worm is turning. Here’s Fairey’s work turned on itself. Not bad work.

 And this has been getting a lot of attention lately:

It appeared pasted on a remote pillar in essentially the middle of nowhere. Of course, LA Weekly called it an abomination, a call to a lynching, adding “all that’s missing is the noose.”

However, this image, published in Vanity Fair – not on a remote overpass by some unknown street artist, but rather by the editor of a major national magazine – was, on the other hand, hailed as brilliant satire and a remarkable statement on the sad state of American affairs.

 The Obama/Joker is an excellent photoshop job, but as propaganda it could use some work. The Joker’s signature line was “Why so serious?” If you had done this…

… you would have had a masterpiece.  This image works because of the fake smile hiding sinister intent. Many people are starting to get that impression of this President.  This image has real power.

People obsessed with their own image expect some opposition. But there is one thing the true narcissist cannot tolerate…

This is the killer ap. I wouldn’t worry about the Joker poster so much, Mr. President. But if this catches on, and your policies are reduced to three-letter ridicule… well, sir, then you are in real trouble.

38 Comments

[If you would rather hear and see this (and it's better with some vocal steam and supporting pictures), you can view the Afterburner version for free, here.]

Well, Sarah Palin has stepped down as Governor of Alaska. Fighting a seemingly endless string of harassment lawsuits has taken pretty much all of her time and $500,000 of her money. That’s real money to the Palins. That’s real money to me, and probably to you too.

At least fifteen ethics complaints had been leveled against Governor Palin, and all of them have been dismissed as baseless. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it? Decent people, like most of you out there, probably don’t appreciate just how easy it is to destroy someone of integrity if you have no integrity of your own.

Here’s how it works. Fifteen assorted bloggers and miscreants of various stripes launch unsubstantiated ethics complaints against the Governor of Alaska, who, because of Alaska state law, is not immune from having to fight them. Fifteen charges of corruption – no matter whether they are true or not – means that the public hears nothing but the words “Palin” and “Corruption” being solemnly reported by the press.  Even the phrase “cleared of corruption charges” makes that subconscious connection.

And that’s all it takes: false accusations. Consider this:

Bill Clinton spent every second of his Presidency – every second – knowing exactly what to say if the words “Paula Jones” or “Gennifer Flowers” or “Monica Lewinski” came up in conversation, or at a press conference, or even in the middle of deep sleep. If Hillary just whispered the words:

“Monica Lewinski”

…Bill would bolt upright in bed and sputter: “I did not have sex with that woman! Whichever one you mentioned!”

He’s ready for accusations because he knows he’s guilty. That’s what guilty people do all day: work on the explanation and the alibi. But an innocent person, when charged with corruption or lying or worse – well, it shakes them to the core, the same way it would shake you to your core if you were accused of some heinous act you did not commit. And if these false accusations came at you again and again and again, how many times would it take before you said, to hell with this. Who needs this? This is destroying my family. A guilty person has that factored going in; it’s part of their mental equation. But it’s enough to drive an innocent person out, and that was the goal.  Wasn’t it?

There’s a reason the word Satan means “the Accuser” in Hebrew, and why “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is one of the Ten Commandments. A false accusation against an innocent person is often more effective than a real accusation is against a guilty one.  

Now to simply say that Democrats had to attack this Republican is to miss the savagery of the assault, a viciousness that was evidenced on the first day of her announcement as John McCain’s running mate and which continued unabated long after the election. The example of Sarah Palin, you see, is fatal to the liberal worldview.

For forty years now Liberals have defined feminism in a binary way. You simply could not be a feminist – and by implication you could not really demand the opportunities that modern feminism promised – unless you categorically came down on the side of “choice.” You could go out into a man’s world, dress like a man, act like a man, achieve all the wealth and power of a man, perhaps even have a boutique single child — or two, if you could afford a decent nanny.

But Sarah Palin’s decision to see her Down’s Syndrome child to term was an act of such blinding moral clarity that it tore down the drapes and flung open the windows of Miss Havisham’s fetid little parlor. To see Trig Palin being held in his sister’s arms reminded the entire country that this choice has consequences. And furthermore, it showed that you could be Mayor, or Governor, or potentially President of the United States, and still have a big family, dress and talk like a woman, and get there with a mate who was nothing more or less than a good man and loving husband and commercial fisherman, and not ride to power on the coattails of a billionaire businessman, or media mogul, or political superstar.

By choosing life – a flawed life, some would say – Sarah Palin effortlessly displayed what once was the universal maternal instinct… and that put her way, way off the reservation. To present such a clear example of competence, achievement and respect while at the same time running full in the face of the liberal feminist first (and only) commandment, Sarah Palin earned the kind of hatred from the left that is only well and truly reserved for those people who so effortlessly put the lie to their entire philosophy. This is the kind of hate reserved for black Americans like Thomas Sowell or my own friend Alfonzo Rachel, who become traitors to their race as Palin became a traitor to her sex, for having the audacity – the gall, the unmitigated nerve – to have their own thoughts, and make up their own minds, and free themselves from the rigid – and racist and sexist – roles that have been cut out for them by the liberal establishment that perpetually shrieks that it is only working in their best interest out of a rarefied moral superiority. 

And there’s another side of the Democratic Party’s mythical image of itself that she stole from under their feet: the Palin’s are working people, the kind of people the Democratic Party once claimed proudly as their irreducible base before they became the Limousine Leftists we see today. She comes home and makes dinner for the family while Todd – the now-former First Dude – is out in the garage releasing some of the tensions of a hard day at work by tricking out his snow machine for racing season.

No wonder Democrats and Liberals feared her so. And now we get to the heart of the matter. Because it was not just Democrats and Liberals who so fervently wished to see her destroyed. Many Republicans felt the same way.  The LA Times reports:

“I am of the strong opinion that, at present day, she is not ready to be the leading voice of the GOP,” said Todd Harris, a party strategist who likened Palin to the hopelessly dated “Miami Vice” — something once cool that people regard years later with puzzlement and laughter.”  The Times then goes on to quote one Stuart K. Spencer, who has been advising GOP candidates for more than 40 years, who says, “I can’t tell you one thing she brought to the ticket.”

Mr. Harris and Mr. Spencer, I’m not a GOP strategist, so unfortunately I am not able to associate myself with the glory and success that people like you have led the Republican Party to in these last several election cycles.. Here’s what I can tell you, though: as a person of small reputation in little backwater pools on the internet, I spent months – months – defending John McCain as the Republican nominee. Not because he was my first choice, or my second choice, or my third choice… because he wasn’t.

I did it because I felt I had some idea of what this Obama tsunami was going to bring. And I saw, with my own eyes – pay attention now, professional GOP strategists — untold numbers of life-long conservatives saying they were going to sit this one out…just stay at home on Election Day.

Then Sarah Palin came along, and those same people – those exact same people! – wrote about sending in hundreds of dollars and asking for  lawn signs, because for the first time in years they felt there was someone who understood what their lives were like: someone who went hunting and fishing, someone who worked hard for a living, someone who had fought corruption where they found it, regardless of the personal cost, someone who had a son fighting in Iraq, someone who knew how to handle a gun and actually owned one! Someone who unabashedly loved America, someone who could be tough and decisive and still be feminine, someone who put family above politics and who was doing a job with quiet competence and who by most accounts did not spent every living day of her life maneuvering and plotting and kissing ass because she had some defective political gene that drove her to want to become President from the age of three.

Sarah Palin — clinging with an incandescent lack of bitterness to her guns and her religion — energized the base of this party in a way I have never witnessed before. Now, of course, I need to again remind you that I am not a GOP strategist. But just between me and actual Republican strategist Stuart K. Spencer, who does not know what she brought to the ticket, I’ll tell you right now. I’ll clue you in.

She brought just about every vote that the Republicans got.

Those people – those actual conservatives that went out and voted – don’t think Sarah Palin cost John McCain the election. They think John McCain cost Sarah Palin the election. It was John McCain’s elitist genius advisors that buried her for two weeks after her knockout GOP acceptance speech – the one that put the McCain / Palin ticket up 7-15 points in the very week after Barack Obama’s Temple Coronation – and then hid her in a basement trying to polish her up to midtown Manhattan standards of sophistication and erudition before they walked her into back-to-back ambush interviews. It was these elitist “campaign staffers” that decided to buy $150,000 of high-end clothes for a woman who always looks best when she is dressed as who she is: a regular working person. And, of course, those clothes went on to become another of the “corruption” and “Diva” charges they leaked against her to protect their own miserable, cowardly asses so that they can continue to advise future campaigns into the dustbin of history.   

Let’s wrap this up by getting to brass tacks here.

This isn’t a fight between Democrats and Republicans, or even between Liberals and Conservatives. This is a fight to the death between the populists and the elites.

Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama.  He is urban; she is rural. He preaches dependency on the government and she leads a life of independence. He consistently apologizes for the sins of the country he was elected to lead, and she is unabashedly proud of it. He opposes the war in Iraq; she has skin in the game. And on and on.

And that is why she had to be destroyed, by the Democratic Party, by the New York media elites, and by many of the inside-the-beltway voices of various and sundry GOP “strategists.”

She needs to be destroyed because the one thing that can never be allowed to happen is this: you cannot have a voice in this political debate. You know who I mean. You rubes, you hicks out there in flyover country. Your job is pay taxes, vote for who they have decided over cocktails makes them feel better about themselves, and occasionally provide your inbred idiot sons and daughters for the army or police force or whatever you people without Ivy League educations do with your tawdry little lives.

Meanwhile, the Harvard-educated elitist geniuses will run the country according to their infinitely brighter intellectual and moral lights. 

And whatever happens, do not be distracted by inconvenient facts that you might stumble upon as you listen to Faux News, or your hate-filled talk radio, or right-wing nutjob blogs. Pay no attention to the fact that small banks, run by hayseeds like yourselves, were in no financial troubles at all lending money and writing mortgages to people who could afford to pay it back, but who are now are being forced to pay for the failure of genius-level Harvard Business School ideas like Collateralized Debt Obligations which essentially brought down the greatest economy the world has ever seen.

And remember, it’s just a coincidence that Harvard grads John F. Kennedy and Robert S McNamara not only got us into the Vietnam war, they also determined the genius-level rules of engagement that caused inbound Naval aviators to look down at, but not attack, the surface-to-air missiles being unloaded at Haiphong Harbor. They’d see those same missiles again in a few weeks when they were shot down and killed by them.

That’s genius-level, Harvard-quality thinking. Not like that simpering idiot, that commonplace dolt Ronald Reagan. I mean, the man went to Eureka College, for God’s sake! Who’s even heard of Eureka College? The fact that he defied forty years of Harvard-educated State Department officials and defeated the Soviet Union with plain speaking and common sense and some antiquated, embarrassing and– one might say tacky – belief in his country and its people… well, that’s surely coincidence as well.

Here’s a final, quick little thought for you.

Saul Alinski wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. Hillary Clinton wrote about it in her senior’s thesis. And if Hillary Clinton learned from it, Barack Obama taught from it: the term community organizer was coined by Alinski and was the centerpiece of his theory that the socialization of America could best be accomplished from within the system since Americans were alert to revolutions forced upon them from the outside.

One of the Rules for Radicals is Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules. Think about the genius of that. Just let that sink in. When a Republican has an ethics scandal, it’s “hypocrisy” and “double standards” and all the rest. But when a Clinton or a Pelosi or a Charley Rangel or a Chris Dodd or a Barney Frank or a William Jefferson has an ethics scandal, no one bats an eye. Why? Because of course they’re immoral! They’re Democrats.

Alinski could see that moral people have to be held to moral standards when immoral people do not. We’d better learn a lesson from this, right quick. Here’s an example of the kind of lesson good and decent people must learn about people like Saul Alinski and his followers:

The Battle of Guadalcanal was the first real test of the US Marine Corps in World War II. There was real anger toward the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and the atrocities they had committed in China and to American prisoners at Bataan, but the Marines had not yet dealt with them face to face and still reserved a professional soldier’s decency towards surrendering troops.

A Marine recon unit reported seeing Japanese troops flying a white flag on an isolated spit of land near Guadalcanal, and so A Marine named Frank Goettge asked for volunteers to help rescue these surrendering Japanese soldiers. 25 men stepped forward, and when they reached the beach the Marines warily went ashore to help the trapped Japanese. Once they were all within range, the Japanese opened fire with machine guns, and after hours of fighting only one Marine was able to escape. As he swam away he looked over his shoulder, and saw the flashing Samurai swords of the Japanese officers as they hacked at and beheaded the survivors. When reinforcements returned they found that their buddies had been mutilated and dismembered, and any Marine corps tattoos had been hacked off their arms and stuffed into their mouths.

The Marines never treated the Japense the same way after that.

Alinski and his followers want you to believe that if you fight dirty in response to people fighting dirty with you, then you have lost your morals and in fact your identity. But that’s a lie.

We are in a political fight to the death with people who will stop at nothing – and I’m not talking about your average decent Democrat, but rather these Alinski radicals. And if we don’t face the same realization as those Marines on Guadalcanal and give back as brutally as we have taken, then we will lose.

Which is what they want. And if we do lose to these kind of tactics, there will be no more decent people left in politics. As of today, we’re one short already.

76 Comments

One of the things I was most looking forward to in coming to PJTV was bringing my experience producing and editing editing television for places like THE HISTORY CHANNEL and DISCOVERY NETWORK to bear on some issues I have always wanted to cover.

Right now the internet is in a strange place: it’s passed the point of dial-up modems where streaming video was simply out of the question, and it’s still considerably short of what is clearly coming: the merging of what we know as “the internet” and “cable television” into the same creature. So what I have tried to do with A SOLDIER’S STORY and my recent special on XCOR AEROSPACE is to put cable television on the internet. I’m not sure how well it works. They’re longer than “internet videos” and because they look like cable television they are much more labor intensive. Right now they don’t seem to be getting the hits needed to justify their production time, but thankfully PJTV is a forward-looking company and we still have time to play.

So here’s the link to my adventure in Private Space Exploration:

LunarPalooza Part 1: The Future of Space Exploration Is In Your Hands

LunarPalooza Part 2: Private Enterprise Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

And I’m proud to say that part two of the first A SOLDIER’S STORY is now online. Leon Cooper finished his nightmare at Tarawa, came home for some R&R, and then shipped out to a little vacation beach called Iwo Jima. We also get his views on the dropping of the atomic bombs, and find that discussing the people that have second-guessed the whole things provides Leon Cooper and Bill Whittle with a common adjective.

Leon Cooper, Part 2: Escaping Death, Iwo Jima & The Atomic Bomb

Also, I am trying to get on a much more predictable schedule regarding output, since A SOLDIER STORY and the LUNARPALOOZA took so much of my time. I hope to have a new Afterburner segment up every Monday morning, and since I plan to record it on the previous Wednesday, I mean to post it here by Friday night so you regular stalwarts get the scoop. Look for Sarah Palin very shortly in print here at E3, and then the video version on the PJTV AFTERBURNER page early Monday.

12 Comments

Even before I was hired at PJTV in September, I had wanted to do a series of interviews with veterans. And now, finally, I am very proud to announce the first episode of A SOLDIER’S STORY.

Leon Cooper was 22 years old when he commanded a wave of Higgins boats in the shallow waters off of Tarawa. Due to one of the most tragic miscalculations of the war, the tidal information was incorrect and the first waves of boats could not clear the reefs… leaving hundreds of teen-aged Marines 700 yards offshore, wading through waist-deep water wearing 100 pound packs, into the teeth of 8 inch naval guns, mortars, machine guns and small arms fire.

Leon Cooper saw the whole thing. And after surviving his first trip into that bloody nightmare, he had to turn around, head back out to the troop ship, and bring fresh young men into the meatgrinder.  Again and again.

That would be enough for any 22 year old. But after surviving Tarawa, Leon began training to do it again — which he did, at a tiny speck in the Pacific called Iwo Jima.  

Part I of Leon Cooper’s Soldier Story — Tarawa – can be found here. Part 2 will deal with Iwo Jima and the Atomic Bombs, and Part 3 will follow his Return to Tarawato discover a battlefield covered in garbage and human waste, and the unspeakable disgrace of having hundreds of fallen American heroes — including a man posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor — buried under parking lots and septic tanks.  

There are somewhat graphic images, and a few moments of salty language — but this is something I would encourage you to watch with your families, simply because it is so heartbreaking. If we do not often remember the cost of our freedoms, we will surely lose them. Listening to what these boys did for us — and that’s what they were: teen-aged boys, for the most part – brought home to me the debt we owe these remarkable men. It is the very least we can do to listen to their stories. They are amazing stories, funny and tragic and full of wisdom, and I mean to tell as many of them as I can, from World War 2 up through the present.

But to do that, I will need your help. If you feel as strongly about these segments as I do, would you help us get them seen by emailing as many people as you can, by copying and pasting the following  link:

http://www.pjtv.com/video/A_Soldier%27s_Story%2C_Hosted_by_Bill_Whittle/Leon_Cooper%2C_Part_1%3A_The_Battle_for_Tarawa/2149/

I would never ask this for myself, but I am asking you now for Leon and for all of the millions of other heroes that surround us in line at the grocery store or sitting in the next car on the highway.  Their greatest quality is their almost universal humility, which is what I admire most about them even as I realize it is the reason we hear so little of their enormous sacrifice. My ability to continue this series — which is very labor- and time-intensive on my part — will depend on the segements getting enough views to make the game worth the candle.

And if any of you would care to leave coments for Leon in the comment section, I will collect and forward them to him as a small token of the gratitude you will certainly feel once you hear his amazing story.

BW

23 Comments

[Awfully late in posting the text to this one. You can see the original Howieburner here, for free. ]

Ladies and Gentlemen, in the immortal words of Tony Montana, “say hello to my little friend…”

This is Howie. I’ve been taking care of him for almost a week now, and during that time Howie has taught me a lot of things.

A few years ago, Dana and I bought an airplane: this little beauty right here. It’s called a Sky Arrow:

Last Sunday, after several weeks of being grounded for various reasons, we decided to go flying, and during the preflight inspection I noticed something buried deep in the engine cowling. It was a bird’s nest. And when I pulled it out… there was Howie.

Now, as it turns out, Howie and I have a lot in common. Like most fledglings, Howie went through an awkward stage. Even four days ago, he wasn’t the handsome little dude you see here today.

He’s not the only one. Many of us flyers start out just a tiny bit dorky and slowly, over time, manage to grow into our feathers.

When Howie first came home, I couldn’t get him to eat anything. Howie refused to take food and spent the day pressing up against the bars of his cage, pushing to find a way to get out.  But over time – just a few days, really  – something has changed.

Howie is starting to lose his inborn drive to be free. He is starting to become dependent. And I wonder if this isn’t what’s happening to all of us, as a country.

Those of us who see the dangers in the nanny state often think of the growth of government into more and more areas of our lives as an intentional, and ultimately evil thing – because we can foresee the consequences. But I had none of those motivations when I started feeding Howie. I just wanted him to be as strong as he could be so when he’s old enough to set free he’ll have the odds on his side. 

What I have learned from Howie is that we are bleeding freedoms not because people want to enslave us but because they genuinely want to help and protect us.  There are predators out there, and parasites, and it’s cold and wet, and there’s no guarantee he’ll find food or shelter and I don’t want to risk any of that because I’ve been hand feeding him and I’m responsible for him and I just love this little guy.

I no longer want to make him strong so I can release him. I want to keep him. I want to watch out for him and make sure he’s a safe and fat little bird. Even if it means he can only hear the birds outside and never join them, only flap his wings from sunrise to sunset and flutter around in this little cage, and not become a bird at all – which is what he is supposed to be – but become, in the end, nothing more than my toy because when it is all said and done I was too selfish and too afraid to let him be what he wants to be, and needs to be, and was made to be.

When we feed and clothe and make dependent people who – unlike this little fledgling – are perfectly capable of feeding and clothing themselves and being free and independent as they were meant to be… when we do those things we construct our own cages, step into the warm, comfortable, downy softness and pull the door closed behind us.

The Book of Matthew it says that not a sparrow falls without God knowing it. For most of my adult life I’ve believed that all that we see is all that there is: just bone and skin and feathers. I believe absolutely that little Howie’s perfect form is the result of millions of years of evolution and natural selection… in fact, millions of years ago, Howie’s ancestors were three times my height and mine were about his size. Bottom rail on top now, huh Howie?

Howie’s brain – charitably – is about the size of a pea. Mine’s about the size of a cantaloupe. Sitting here, right now Howie’s only aware that he’s safe and warm and that this monstrous huge hairless primate attached to a plastic tube is his mommy.

That’s all Howie is capable of, given the pea. What we, with the cantaloupes perceive is that what you are seeing is an image focused by a cleverly shaped piece of glass onto microscopic pieces of silicon, which generate the most impossibly small little pulses of lightning. These pulses travel at the speed of light to an air-conditioned room where they are written to magnetic disks spinning at 150 revolutions per second, and from there they travel on beams of coherent light circling the world five times in the blink of an eye, so that someone in Hawaii, or Singapore, or New York can see a picture of a little bird – not just now, but for months, or years, or maybe even centuries into the future.

Now obviously, Howie is aware of none of this. Because he just has the little pea to work with, you see? But if there’s that much difference between a pea and a cantaloupe, how is it that I once believed that there is nothing beyond the perception of a cantaloupe made of grey jelly?

Mathematics and logic make a compelling case for this being an eleven-dimensional universe, of which we directly experience three as we drift along the fourth, which we perceive as “time.” The universe has been expanding for 15 billion years. Expanding into what? And what was there before the Big Bang? 

See? Now we’re reaching the limit of the cantaloupe. Perhaps if I had a watermelon I’d know the answers to those questions!

The distance between Howie and me – between the pea and the cantaloupe – may not be much less than the distance between myself and a greater being who’s perceptions and powers are as far beyond me as mine are beyond Howie’s, and who may in fact note the fall of every sparrow. And if he does, I hope he takes special note of this one. I hope he will lift him – and all of us, too – up and out of the four dimensions of space and time the way I first lifted Howie out of his broken nest, and for the same unlikely reason that this hairless primate cares for this little bird: because he can.

And perhaps you can find a way to go out and do intentionally what we did by accident: go do one small, good thing. You may have a future family member sitting alone in a steel cage at an animal shelter right now, shivering in fear. You can’t do much about the economy or Iran or any of the rest of it, but you can go out – right now – and save a little life.  If events in the world have been getting you down, saving one small life that would not have been saved without you… well, that’s the cure, right there.

I have to go now. We have to set little Howie free. I’m gonna miss him. This little guy taught me a lot.  

(Epilogue: The day after I wrote this, Dana and I took Howie to the California Wildlife Center. He’ll spend a week or so indoors getting weaned and learning Finch from other little finches, then he’ll spend two weeks in an outdoor aviary getting his flight training before being released with his entire cohort into the scenic birdie paradise of Malibu Canyon. I couldn’t see a thing on the drive home, I was so upset. It’s funny, isn’t it. how things can come from deep left field and move you in ways you didn’t even know you could be moved.  Damn, how we miss that little bird.)

23 Comments

[As usual, there are many visual and audio elements in the video that I can't reproduce on the page. The editorial is free, and does not require subscription or registration (although we always appreciate either). You can watch it here.] 

For the video impaired… here’s the transcript:

As if we’re not already overextended enough financially, the issue of National Health Care is now on the table once more vote. Here’s some perspective you might find interesting.

Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We had an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.

Let’s take a look at social security itself. Again, very few of us disagree with the original premise that there should be some form of savings that would keep destitution from following unemployment by reason of death, disability or old age. And to this end, social security was adopted, but it was never intended to supplant private savings, private insurance, pension programs of unions and industries.

Now in our country under our free enterprise system we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.

But let’s also look from the other side, at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.  All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it is a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your children won’t decide when they’re in school where they will go or what they will do for a living. They will wait for the government to tell them where they will go to work and what they will do.

What can we do about this? Well, you and I can do a great deal. We can write to our congressmen and our senators. We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms. And at the moment, the key issue is, we do not want socialized medicine.

Former Representative Halleck of Indiana has said, “When the American people want something from Congress, regardless of its political complexion, if they make their wants known, Congress does what the people want.”

So write, and if your representative writes back to you and tells you that he or she too is for free enterprise, that we have these great services and so forth, that must be performed by government, don’t let them get away with it. Show that you have not been convinced. Write a letter right back and tell them that you believe ingovernment economy and fiscal responsibility; that you know governments don’t tax to get the money the need; governments will always find a need for the money they get and that you demand the continuation of our free enterprise system. You and I can do this. The only way we can do it is by writing to our congressmen even we believe that he is on our side to begin with. Write to strengthen his hand. Give him the ability to stand before his colleagues in Congress and say “I have heard from my constituents and this is what they want.”

Write those letters now; call your friends and them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.

*          *          *          *          *

With the exception of the first two sentences, nothing you just heard was written by me. I was simply repeating, verbatim, the words of another American thinker and philosopher – although slightly edited to remove the references to the time in which these words were first spoken.

That time was 1961, and the philosopher who had such an astute grasp of the dangers of that impending socialism was a B-list Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan.  

Of course, most liberals would just as soon forget Reagan and all that he represented. The disturbing thing is that many high-level Republicans are calling for exactly the same thing. But those of us who continue to revere Ronald Reagan do so not out of a sense of nostalgia, or from an Obama-like Cult of personality, but rather because he clearly and unashamedly sets forth not policy positions but rather fundamental moral and ethical standards.

 I will never “get over” Ronald Reagan because Ronald Reagan expressed with perfect clarity the values of discipline, optimism and individuality that my country and my moral code is based upon. That’s non-negotiable for me. Like Reagan, I was not born into this philosophy. Like Reagan, I came to these conservative core principles only after much study and deep reflection.

And I know that many of you feel the same way: that calls to abandon these principles from people ostensibly sharing our same conservative position is not a “hopeful, forward-looking re-branding,” but rather a retreat and surrender to the forces and philosophies we should be fighting tooth and nail, not emulating and accommodating.

You know, a Gallup poll taken just a few days ago revealed that 40% of the electorate identified themselves as “conservative,” compared to 35% who call themselves “moderate” and only 21% who identify as “liberal.”

Here’s Reagan’s electoral map from 1984:

Maybe if we started running again as actual conservatives, we might win some elections. That’s just a crazy little thought that I had.   

I spoke Reagan’s words for him simply to get you to hear them fresh again. Go listen to the original; it’s a far, far better speech than I will ever be able to give. But not for an instant would I presume to be able to close it they way he did. So here it is… and we turn our back on this voice and this wisdom at our mortal peril:

Write those letters now; call your friends and them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until, one day, as Normal Thomas said we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

17 Comments

Well, here it is: THE DOWD CONUNDRUM

It took a MASSIVE amount of work to do something like this; if I had any idea at the outset I wouldn’t have done it since it tied up so much of my time and resources. But the fact is, it was a lot of fun and I had a blast.

Certainly not my deepest work, but there is an important point in there, regarding the dangers of elitist and intellectual thinking. I’d never really gotten to the bottom of why these smart people are so consistently correct and brilliant in their chosen fields and yet so spectacularly wrong almost all of the time when it comes to politics.

It’s funny, isn’t it — where you decide to draw the line? After I got the idea to do this piece, I decided to see the new Star Trek movie again so I caught a late show. I was driving home over Sepulveda pass after it was over – this would be at about 1:30 am — mumbling to myself: “The Left took Hollywood, music, late night comedy, universities, high schools, the news media and just about every other damn thing away from us… but they are not getting Star Trek, God damn them! I am not surrendering the Enterprise! Not without a fight!”

So there is some brain food in there, but the fact is, it just gave me a chance to do two things that have overwhelming power over me: 1.) Put on a custom-made gold velour jersey, and 2.) work with my buddy Maurice LaMarche. He’s the voice of The Brain in Pinky and the Brain, portrays Morbo, Calculon, Kiff and Hedonismbot (among an hundred-odd others) on Futurama and who can teach you — yes, YOU! — how to Talk Like William Shatner by going straight here.

Here are some screen grabs to whet your appetite.

PJTV has once again been kind enough to post this without needing either a subscription or even registration. They can’t keep doing this forever, so if you like it and want to see more coming, needless to say a subscription — even registration, which is free — would help convince my Insect Overlords that this is moving in the right direction.

I’ll post the transcript as an essay in about a week (because more than than anything else I’ve done, this needs to be seen rather than read.)

Up Next: I’m going to try something a little different. I’m going to try to concentrate on two things now: AFTERBURNERS like the Atomic Bomb segments: well researched, factual and exhaustive; and a new series which I am going to call The Common Sense Resistance, which I want to be a series that examines the philosophical underpinnings of what is today known as “Conservative” thought but which is really just Common Sense: that shared wisdom built into society over hundreds of years of trial and error.

I’ll start with a look at Thomas Sowell’s brilliant — and I mean BRILLIANT — analysis of the two schools of modern Western thought. Unless some liberal pundit steps on another land mine, next up will be THE TRAGEDY OF THE UNCONSTRAINED VISION. It’s going to look and feel very different and I’m really excited about it. Until then, I hope you enjoy watching THE DOWD CONUNDRUM as much as I enjoyed making it.

47 Comments