Where are the great?

(Denver Post, Dec. 2) Midgets everywhere. Rappers, starlets, shrinks, scolds, facilitators, litigators, hustlers, hucksters, victims, vegans. Ours is the age of the shallow, the small, the squalid. Where are the great? “There were giants in the earth in those days,” says Genesis. Granted, every era magnifies the memory of bygone times. But what now passes for excellence in manhood and womanhood, thought and expression, moral and civic life, would make our grandparents shake their heads. For a third of a century we’ve lived in a house I call Marcus Bend, after my mother’s father, who helped buy it. I’m here surrounded with books and mementoes as the old year wanes, sobered by Christmas clamor, candidate noise and war news, wondering and worrying: Where are the great?

Stacked on the desk are “From Dawn to Decadence” by Jacques Barzun, “America: The Last Best Hope” by William Bennett, “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis, Winston Churchill’s memoir “My Early Life,” an FDR biography by Conrad Black, books on Chesterton and John Paul II, “The Western Canon” by Harold Bloom, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” and his Harvard address. Collectively they look upon 2007 and frown.

The scholarly Barzun, who turned 100 last week, is a great man of our time and a worthy judge of greatness. His book, a history of civilization from 1500 to the present, warns of today’s “urge to build a wall against the past…a revulsion from things in the present that seem a curse from our forebears.”

He writes of the 20th century as a time when elements that “made the nation-state the carrier of civilization… a common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service… were decaying and could not be restored.” He hopes for a 22nd century when boredom may stir new “radicals” to study afresh the old texts, “the record of a fuller life,” from which the West then rediscovers “what a joy it is to be alive.” Of the present century Jacques Barzun is less hopeful.

By what sickness of the soul could America and other nations blessed with the heritage of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia come to see all of this as “a curse from our forebears?” Solzhenitsyn, another contemporary great, gives the diagnosis:

“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer…. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty.” It is not true, insists the Russian giant, that “man is above everything.” Nor is it right that “man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all.”

Courage, faith, integrity, and honor, ordinary virtues harnessed to extraordinary gifts, constitute human greatness or the potential for it. Guy McBride, retired president of the Colorado School of Mines, and Vernon Grounds, retired president of Denver Seminary, have that heroic stature with me. Some of those books I’ve found so inspiring, by or about the great, reached me through them.

Great souls ennoble our world in big and little ways. Think of the late Bill Hosokawa of the Denver Post, or former Sen. Bill Armstrong. Is there a touch of that in Peter Groff, recently chosen as Colorado Senate President? We’ll see.

Over the centuries, nations flourish and fade in a cycle, the Scots philosopher Alexander Tytler is supposed to have said. Out of bondage come faith and courage, then liberty and abundance. But when these breed complacency and apathy, dependence ensues and bondage returns. If this sounds like an American self-portrait, we need to value greatness more.

Thanksgiving 2007, such as it is

Two turkeys named May and Flower will not be carved up tomorrow after all. They were spared by a mock presidential pardon earlier this week. Do you care? Me neither, but I learned about it on the White House home page, in the course of looking for President Bush's official Thanksgiving Day proclamation. The pardon story is right there up front, whereas you have to drill down a layer or two to find the proclamation. This is what we've come to, 218 years after the First US Congress resolved to ask President George Washington for an official proclamation of national thanksgiving. He obliged with this masterpiece, which along with Lincoln's wartime proclamation of 1863 is probably the best known in the long line of annual documents.

I enjoy reading each year's proclamation, no matter who is in the White House. I grew up hearing them read in church services on the Thursday morning, prior to our family dinner around my mother's or grandmother's table. The menu was always turkey, but back then that wasn't the name of the day. The day was about giving gratitude to God for his favor upon our nation, and honoring Him in hope of its continuation.

In the 1950s in those towns where I lived in Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado, Americans still believed that "it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor," as Washington's 1789 proclamation puts it.

Many agreed with the Father of our Country, even then, that the prayers on Thanksgiving Day should go so far as to "beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions" as well as "to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue" in America.

Lincoln's 1863 proclamation is also worth reading in full and pondering. In the third year of a horrific civil war, the Emancipator was able to enumerate many blessings for which gratitude to God was due, summarizing: "No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy."

Like Washington, he too urged that the day include "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience," and his recommended approach to praying for peace did not omit a submissive note, foreshadowing the Second Inaugural address 16 months later. Citizens, he urged, should "fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union" (italics added).

It's a long way from the sunlit America of 1789 to the agonized land of 1863 to the turkey pardon of 2007. I very seldom agree with Marx about anything, but you wonder if this is one of those cases he noted of history repeating itself -- first as tragedy and then as farce.

While President Bush's proclamation for this year contains little that God-fearing Americans may disagree with, there is almost nothing in it that challenges us to remember a Deity whom the first president called "that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be" and whom the 16th president referred to as "the Source... our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."

Bush mentions God only a single time in his own words about the present day, and only twice more in historical references to what earlier generations believed. This from a president who is undoubtedly a man of deep faith, directed to a country that has been called the world's most devout, "a nation with the soul of a church." It's a matter, I guess, of what any public official is now permitted (by the secularist watchdogs of mass media and cultural elites) to say upon any public occasion, even Thanksgiving Day. One is moved to cry out, not flippantly but in all earnest: God help us!

Wild swirls, no; wild girls, no problem

On Fox News the other night, Oct. 19, there was a discussion between Greta Van Susteren and Laura Ingraham about "Girls Gone Wild,"the national TV show that features such debauchery as inebriated 18-year-old girls flashing the camera with their bare breasts. Ms. Ingraham expressed the view that such displays are a demeaning exploitation of women (true). Yet Ms. Van Susteren held that such activities could not and should not be stopped owing to 1st Amendment constitutional liberties (which is also true). The question to ask is this: why is not Joe Francis doing a "Saudi Arabian Girls Gone Wild" version of his show? Probably because he knows it would be suicidal. That again is true -- and it's a direct, if extreme, extension of Laura Ingraham's point.

Greta Van Susteren, the apparent secularist, has subconsciously embraced the progressive view that does two things in cases like this.

One, it substitutes legalism for morality. This is the principal reason the ACLU is working diligently to sever the Judeo-Christian roots of our society. It seeks to enhance the idea that activist judges are the ones to determine good and evil. This would pave the way to euthanasia of the aged and handicapped, as well as wholesale abortion; an overall devaluation of life such as we see in Holland today. Though the ACLU paints itself as a "defender of liberty," what they really wish to do is install a progressive, elitist governance of our society by those (themselves) who "know better what's good for us".

Secondly, progressivism assumes there could only be a governmental solution to such an issue and reaches for it.

Laura Ingraham, by contrast, advocates public outrage to shut such programs down. The purveyors of the various degrees of X ratings would never show restraint unless pressured to do so, or when faced with broad moral disapproval such as there still is (we'll see for how long) against pedophilia and bestiality.

The liberal media is manifestly terrified of religious and moral condemnation when its originates from the Islamics. Muslim fury at the slightest perceived insult has even the most ardent liberals running for cover. A recent example was Islamic objection to an ad for ice cream cones because the swirls on top looked something like the Arabic for "Allah." Certainly, then, a "Saudi Arabian Girls Gone Wild" is out of the question.

And if our Western Civilization is to survive, at some point the "Girls Gone Wild" should be out of the question here as well. The corollaries of illegimate births, smashed lives and the poverty of single mom households are not a good thing.

The American Garden: an allegory

The American Garden is the most beautiful on earth. No other garden produces more bounty and benefit for the people of the world than this one. It’s filled with plants and trees of different sizes that produce all matter of fruits and vegetables. The market stalls are filled daily with this wondrous bounty, and it has been so for a couple of hundred years. Yet if the Garden is to continue to blossom and yield its bounty, every generation of gardeners is obligated to fertilize, water, weed, and prune constantly the ever present gnarled socialist dead roots. They must dig out the old and unproductive to make room for the new. Only if this is done will the American Garden continue to flourish.

Many of the plants migrated here from European gardens. The European gardeners in centuries past expelled these plants, deciding they only wanted certain sorts of plants. Or the plants themselves decided to come to the North American Garden to find room to grow. The European gardens are much older than the American one. In Europe, every square centimeter of land has been cultivated for centuries. The gnarled socialist dead root structures suck most of the nutrients from the land. The blossoms are very small, and there is absolutely no room for anything new. Yet the plants that came here wanted to be a part of our Garden. They wanted to blossom and grow, and add to the beauty of the American Garden.

But the American Garden is now threatened. Progressive gardeners, who identify with the European gnarled socialist dead roots, believe that is the important thing in a garden. They take the market stalls filled with produce for granted. “Has it not always been so?” they ask? In their eyes, it’s more important to make the Garden “fair”. It’s unfair that there are plants that are taller and have more fruit than others, or are bigger and have more blossoms than others.

Their vision is a European Marxist-style garden with all the same size plants, few blossoms, and all utterly dependent on the gnarled socialist dead root structure they wish to establish. And they recognize if they can import enough squatty yucca plants from south of the border, they can take over the Garden and put their plan into action.

The progressive gardeners are also nostalgic about the Garden of 1945. They write books entitled “The Greatest Generation of gardeners” or do TV specials called “The Weeding”, not admitting they are forsaking their generational responsibility to keep the Garden flourishing. “We have the most beautiful garden in the world” they say. “Therefore, it can tolerate a few weeds, and we don’t need to prune, fertilize or water as much”. Rather than dirty their hands pruning or fertilizing, they attend cocktail parties criticizing the Garden’s ‘inequities’ or fantasizing about the virtues of the Marxist Garden, ignoring the Eastern European garden’s utter failure, including the death toll of a hundred million plants.

In a Marxist garden, the Marxist gardeners give the plants blossom quotas, and threaten to uproot them if they fail. Yet all the water and fertilization is consumed by the gnarled socialist roots. Marxist gardeners believe that all the plants should have the “social consciousness” to blossom properly. In their view, it is “social deviationism” that causes them to fail. Thus, more blossoms can be achieved by threats and uprootings as an example to others.

Another threat to the Garden is the Islamic thistle that is blowing in from the distant deserts. There is some talk about the necessity of weeding out these thistles to preserve the Garden. But the Progressive tolerant gardeners argue “was not our garden established with transplants originally?” That’s true, but the Islamic thistles are not like the other transplants.

Islamic Thistles derive from parched, poverty-stricken, barren lands that have remained unchanged for thousands of years. They can’t comprehend fertile lands and flowing rivers except as an afterlife paradise. Yet their long-dead gardener has given them the mission to spread their barren, medieval, weed-strewn poverty around the world. They have no intention of blossoming and adding to the American Garden. It is their stated intention to replace every plant in our Garden with their noxious weed and choke out and kill everything else. That is reason enough to cull these thistles from our garden. And there is some weeding taking place in distant lands. Even so, the progressive gardeners object.

Progressive gardener George Soros argues that pulling the thistles is what’s causing them to grow. Other Progressive gardeners lament that the thistles seem to return no matter how fast they are pulled. They wish to give up and withdraw the weeders. The Ecclesiastical gardeners hold that weeding of any kind is immoral, because it destroys life. They choose to ignore the death and destruction over the centuries and up to the present day caused by the Islamic thistles. They have forgotten the thousand-year struggle of their church forefathers to keep the Islamic Thistles from overwhelming all of Christendom! “We just need to reach out, understand, and dialogue with the Islamic thistle” they say.

FBI and Homeland Security gardeners are told by their lawyers that they are forbidden to pull up the Islamic thistles until they actually go to Jihad-seed and do real damage. This in spite of their own studies that show the earlier the Thistles are uprooted, the fewer Jihad-seeds there will be.

Thus is the state of the Garden today. The Marxist Progressive gardeners strive to bring in 40 million yucca plants. They fuel their chain saws while they eye the fruit trees and produce-laden plants. Islamic thistles sprout in every corner of the garden, but are ignored. The Marxist Progressive gardeners prefer to concentrate on “Justice and Equality for the American Garden” and assume the bounty will continue indefinitely.

A closer look at the Jena affair

When a gang of “chip on their shoulders” black youth terrorize and beat white kids, it’s called an “expression of ethnic identity”. But if the white kids band together for protection, it’s called “racist white supremacy.” As shown by this Snopes.com fact check of the Jena affair, the assumed direct linkage of the noose incident and the beatings omits significant intervening events.

The biggest racists in this whole mess are Jesse Jackson and Rev Al Sharpton. The foundational outrage in all of this is the Progressive theological notion that “only the dominant group can be racist”, which is utter nonsense. Either we strive for Martin Luther King’s color blind society or we do not.

The reverse discrimination to “undo the years of discrimination” is fraudulent. And there is no mechanism to turn it off, no way to measure when enough is enough. It is conferring perks and privilege on the basis of skin color, which has fragmented our nation into warring racial and ethnic groups. Diversity is not our strength! It is a source of weakening, division, and conflict. But then, weakening America has always been the Progressive agenda.

Our forefathers realized that in order to build unity they had to leave religious denomination off the table. So must we now concerning race and ethnicity. We enjoy our rights and liberties on an individual basis, not on the basis of our race. We need to eliminate the 3 pages of racial group check boxes we find now on every government application.

The racist agitators such as Jackson and Sharpton need to be shamed, ostracized, put out of business, and recognized as the hypocrites they are.