Clueless celebrities vs. leaders & heroes

Americans need to think and talk more about the timeless principles of leadership, principles that also apply equally well to citizenshipand simple person-hood. How desperately those principles are needed everyday, and how sadly lacking.

Too many "leaders" today are merely celebrities, with no notion of integrity and no commitment to God's goodness. Little wonder that people feel cheated and seek ever anew for some "leader" who could restore good government, but instead the media imposes on us yet another clueless, self-serving celebrity. The risk to our republic is immense.

Then, too, because people are taught that those shallow, unprincipled weaklings must be idolized, people have little chance to learn about genuine goodness. In place of valid heroes, representing by their example the principles and godliness we each need to emulate, the media adulate these false "leaders" and people's moral integrity and civic responsibility erode ever further.

This year, on this blog, let's proclaim the true values that we need in our leaders and in ourselves.

If we're all publishers, no one is

(From PoliticsWest.com) Realization: I've been posting less here lately, and more on Facebook and Twitter. The quick shots and impulsive replies encouraged by the format on those social networks, especially the 140-character limit for a tweet, have become a line of least resistance when I want to sound off. In the last few days, versus a single post here at Politics West, I've gabbed dozens of times to my readers (such as they are) on those sites about things like Jason Salzman's assertion that Scripps should keep losing money, Ritter's clueless budget posture, Schwarzenegger's White House fantasy, and -- just this morning -- TABOR hater Rollie Heath and Christmas grinch Susan Greene.

Thus the downward spiral of convenience (plus brevity and vacuity) continues from books to magazines to daily papers to hourly newscasts to 24/7 cable to unmediated blogs to unprocessed tweets. Thoughtful written expression is dying in a race to the bottom, and to my dismay I'm one of the racers. I don't even use a pocket device for the Internet; probably if I did the descent would be even faster, driven by an itchy brain and carpal thumbs.

But, ahem, there's one small problem. Who reads any of this stuff -- my stuff that is; no doubt yours has a large, rapt audience -- who knows or cares or has the time? Well, I'm afraid it's clear who generally has the time: that would be folks who don't otherwise have much of a life. Which tentatively yields Andrews' Theorem:

The attention paid by any given reader to my online musings is inverse to that individual's ability to make any damn difference on the subject I'm writing about.

Oops -- present company excepted once again! This philosophical metacommunication is a minefield of offense-giving and self-contradiction.

I'm hardly the first to say it, but Twitter in particular is forcing upon me the discomfiting truth that if we're all publishers, no one is. Which brings me full circle to a love and regard for the old, slower, fussily-edited, tree-killing modes of writing -- the book, the magazine, the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News (pray God they both survive) -- and even their electronic cousins such as this website. May it too survive the election year that gave it birth.

So thanks for reading this, if you are. Anybody out there? Hello?

Merry Christmas and all the best for 2009 anyway, he said into the cyber-silence.

The multiple gifts of Christmas

This is the season of giving. Nothing except the birth of the Savior (itself a gift) is more distinctive about Christmas than this. Besides fanning out through multiple department stories over many days and hours in search of something wonderful to present family or friends for this unique holiday, we give the gift of ourselves in love and affection. These are truly wonderful things which brighten up the human condition for a few weeks at least each year, but there are still more wonderful gifts for which we do not deserve any credit although we are responsible for their proper use. I mean the gift of life and of all the real potential for good in our lives.

We live in a scientific age in which many of our greatest intellects are convinced that life and everything that is a part of it can be engineered, not to mention ended if a power or authority decides that some persons’ lives are not worth living.

As in ancient times, it is today an act of moral and spiritual boldness to cherish life, the condition for all good things. Whereas the Israelites were surrounded with peoples for whom child sacrifice was a thoroughly established tradition, God’s chosen people (as they understood themselves) regarded human life as a precious gift from God not lightly to be squandered. Indeed, nothing illustrates the value of life more than the grief we feel when our loved ones die.

When sensible people speak of duty and gratitude, two virtues not much in favor these days, they rank life as the greatest of all gifts to uphold and appreciate. That’s why the framers of the U.S. Constitution included among that document’s greatest purposes security of liberty for our posterity, as well as for the living generations.

The patriotic citizen, then, no less than the pious man, understands that life is the most fundamental of all gifts and therefore the cause of our greatest obligations. We must preserve, protect and defend it as much as we do the charter of liberty that aims to secure it.

Human life is not mere biological existence but the whole panoply of human possibilities. We well know that our mind, spirit or body can be devoted to bad and even evil purposes no less than to good ones, so everything depends on knowing what are our fundamental duties and rights. We have duties to ourselves and to others to promote human happiness, including justice. We have rights to remind ourselves that we must restrain the exercise of our powers.

The philosopher Leo Strauss once wrote that "the genius of Shakespeare is not the work of Shakespeare." He meant in no way to denigrate the achievements of that greatest of all English poets (or any other talented human beings) but to point to the fact that their potential for greatness was the necessary condition and that was due to powers beyond themselves.

Our lives are enriched because of these and other divine gifts. Whence comes our capacity for kindness, gentleness, compassion and sympathy which so uniquely marked the life and the eternal legacy of the God made into man whose nativity will be celebrated in churches all over the world this Christmas? Surely it is our choice to practice these virtues but our capacity for doing so is not our doing.

Consider too, the classical virtues of courage, prudence, wisdom and moderation. Marveling at the sacrifices young Americans have made and continue to make in the armed forces in defense of their country, President Reagan once asked, "Where do we get such men?" He was not in doubt as to the answer, this God-fearing man, and he exhibited the respect which the qualities of God’s children deserve.

Common sense has long distinguished between potential and actual achievement. We know that there are people with great gifts who never use them, or not to the degree to which they are capable. For example, the Greek philosopher Aristotle never confused potential intelligence with actual intelligence, reserving the name of this virtue for the actual use of it. The same can be said for all the other virtues.

The many failures of human potential–and worse, think of the Caesars, Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins of the world–give us all the more reason to appreciate the gifts that we receive from our Creator and to develop them to the fullest, for even the greatest gifts can be abused. We show our appreciation for these divine treasures by treating each other with the greatest respect and glorifying the Author of all these things.

How to annoy an atheist

It's amazingly easily. Just say you want to, and he'll do the rest. Really, some of these no-godders are caricatures of themselves. This week, in possession of some tickets I couldn't use, I fired off a note to a couple of hundred people in our Backbone Americans group on Facebook. The subject line was "Annoy an atheist, attend the Christmas parade." The tone was jocular and ironic, with no edge to it, and concluding with the historical-cultural truism, "Christ is born in Bethlehem. Deal with it, everyone!" (See full text below.)

Well, Facebook worked again, in terms of both useful networking and screwball connections. I not only heard back from some of my favorite young families, one of whom was able to attend the parade. I also smoked out a couple of humorless atheists who apparently can't deal with the Bethlehem thing.

A guy in Arizona wrote me directly: "The Christmas thing is a divide-and-conquer. I don't want anything to do with it. Freedom doesn't use religion as a weapon. I have unjoined your group." In a comment posted on the Backbone Americans page, he added: "I'm a free man in a free country and I don't need your permission or your approval to observe the holiday season differently than you do, and I don't care to debate about it either."

Touchy, touchy. Checking out this fellow's Facebook profile (he and I weren't linked as "friends" and obviously shouldn't be), I found that his political identification is "Individualist Anarchism," and under religious affiliation he asserts, "Organized religion is dangerous." At least to your own blood pressure, amigo.

Also finding the holiday season stressful is another Facebooker in Denver, again someone who had joined Backbone Americans without our knowing each other personally at all, who wrote on the groups page, "Is this a Ted Haggard fan club in disguise?" Huh? Who said anything about Ted Haggard?

On the web profile, this cheerful soul tagged himself politically as a libertarian and religiously (oops, I guess that's an oxymoron) as an atheist. One assumes he wouldn't have joined the Backbone Americans group to start with if he had noticed our dedication to America's founding principles -- which extend atheists toleration but not a veto power over theists' free expression.

When I wrote the original message, I expected the non-believers to send either no reply at all, or good-natured banter and shrugs of the sort I got from Ross Kaminsky, who styled himself "your favorite atheist, whom you can't annoy with a Christmas parade because I think people can believe anything they want as long as they don't try to make me submit to their beliefs."

We need to prescribe some of Rossputin's happy pills for my other overwrought correspondents. Until then, I will try to remember not to incite a panicked rush to the exits by yelling "Christmas" in a crowded Ayn Rand seminar.

Here's the offending Facebook note that started this whole tempest in a Wassail bowl:

Denver area, first come... two adult & one child reserved seats for the renowned Channel 9 Parade of Lights, 8pm Friday. Excellent view of the "Merry Christmas" banner that Hickenlooper tried to 86. See the shocking Nativity float and jolly elf Santa himself at parade climax. We can't use these tickets, let me know if you can.

Outside Denver, start a thread on the Backbone Americans page with what you are doing - or your wildest fantasy - to annoy the atheist grinches in your town.

"Christ is born in Bethlehem." Deal with it, everyone!

Are media feeding copycat suicides?

The troubling report in today's Denver Post about a rash of teen suicides in Douglas County strangely says nothing about last week's huge national story on the Florida teenager who took his own life while an audience watched via live webcast. Here's the Nov. 26 Post story. The AP dispatch on Abraham Biggs' self-murder was carried by the Denver Post online and in print beginning Nov. 21.

Copycat suicides, like copycat school shootings, are a well-documented phenomenon of the sick times we live in. Science writer Malcolm Gladwell, for example, discusses the problem in detail in his 2002 best-seller, The Tipping Point.

The Post did not, to my knowledge, carry a still photo of the tragically deranged Biggs, nor did it link to video of him. But if you Google for "Abraham Biggs suicide video," you get more than 54,000 hits. Horrifying.

Some of those are from unedited wildcat websites of the sort that are now ubiquitous and getting more so. Restraint on the part of those new-media actors can only come from internalized moral scruples of decency. Good luck there.

But shouldn't the responsibly edited news outlets such as the cable and broadcast TV networks be expected to hold themselves to a higher standard?

Fox News Channel, for instance, claims some fidelity to traditional values, but when tabloid sensationalism is in the air, they don't seem to resist very well. They didn't on the Biggs story, from what I saw.

What Biggs did is indisputably "news," as are the technology that he used in doing it and the passively curious or in some cases actively macabre reactions of online witnesses. It had to be covered, and analyzed, up to a point.

But news organizations, in helping give the deceased his wish for global fame, have not only coarsened the moral tone of our times. They have also incentivized more such incidents, arguably abetting a number of deaths that need not have occurred.

Our word "obscene" comes from the ancient Greek ethos that recognized certain human emotions or actions as unworthy of portrayal to an audience -- hence confined to occurring off-scene and receiving no more than secondhand description on stage.

This was done in the interest of (1) preserving dignity for all concerned and (2) protecting onlookers from the very real danger of moral contagion. Those obscenity concerns are as valid in modern America as they were in ancient Athens.

Poor Abraham was diagnosed with severe mental illness, but I'll bet what he did was hastened by just such contagion from the culture. Other Abrahams are all around us right now, in Douglas County and everywhere else. You shudder to think what messages they are receiving from the celebrity he's been given. Obscenity rulings from our courts, or enactments from our lawmakers, are too much to hope for in this licentious age. Self-policing by those with the biggest megaphones, perhaps pushed by a revolted and fed-up public, is the best hope I can see.