Category Archives: The State

Barack And The Biblical Job

Barack Obama, Crime, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Hebrew Testament, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Judaism & Jews, The State

Obama’s prose is flowery and facile. But I am told that this is what appeals to a vast number of Americans. “Healing,” having “national conversations,” hoping and dreaming, reaching for the sky and for the best of America: such meaningless meandering turns this writer’s stomach—at least as much as George Bush’s word salads did.

(By the way, Obama’s remarks in Tucson I read thanks to the New York Times’ civilized habit of providing transcripts. Not even the White House website offers text. So much for encouraging literacy. News sites are becoming a nightmare for those of us who still value the written word over the darting image. “Watch the President’s address” is what you get at Fox News’ website, where print is fast being phased out.)

In any event, the president went light on his base. He did not specifically berate the “blood libel” (a good and appropriate usage by Sarah Palin) perpetrated by the Left against the Right after the Tucson tragedy. I will, however, give him a Brownie point for citing my favorite book among the 39 Books of the Hebrew Bible: Job.

As I wrote in “Job: Jewish Individualist”: “The book of Job is still the quintessential theodicy, precisely because it entertains and reconciles the possibility of a fallible God. Then again, Jews have a tradition of arguing with God. Jacob wrestled physically with the angel of God. And Abraham haggled for the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah because he disapproved of the verdict God pronounced upon them. Job, in a manner, also argued with God and prevailed, a very unorthodox concept, considering the times.”

Obama invoked the righteous Job thus: “Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, ‘when I looked for light, then came darkness.’ Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.”

Palin pointed out that “acts like the shootings in Arizona begin and end with the criminals who commit them.” Unlike Palin, however, whose address earlier today rightly and precisely located the source of evil in the individual perpetrator, Obama here refuses to leave it at that, for this is a man who believes in the role of an interventionist central authority to shape society in politically pleasing ways. If you do not believe in free will, and fail to recognize evil in individuals—then you will be more likely to see a role for the State in the transformation of individuals before the fact:

OBAMA: “We must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.”

Look out.

Blame The Perversion Of Speech

Crime, English, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Justice, Morality, The State

I venture that it is not speech that dangerously inflames febrile passions and unstable minds, but Orwellian speech; lies that belie reality. A good example are the words of the by-now notorious and odious Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the Democrat who called Arizona a “Mecca for prejudice and bigotry”—the right-wing kind, naturally. Dupnik has now come out and said that “We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country.”

Ignore, for a moment, the fact that both parties have made the country worse. Consider: How many generations of young people can you raise on Big Lies—the kind that teach that taking from Peter to lavish on Paul at the point of a gun creates a “better country”? That central planning, the kind that crippled the USSR, will make for a “better” USA? That bankruptcy is verboten if you are a private citizen, but quite fine if you are The State; that borrowing money you don’t intend to repay to finance welfare and warfare in perpetuity is for the “better”; that an OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) equaling your GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is good. And that the larger the parasite (government) the healthier the host (the private economy).

Sooner or later the bumpercrops of rudderless dullards we raise in our public schools will become confused and “crazy.” Jared Lee Loughner used grammar and language as metaphors for his mindlessness. After all, the words the society around him transmitted conflicted with the reality he observed. You could say that he was exposed to schizophrenogenic interactions on an ongoing basis.

Whoever said that what we commonly call insanity is a sane response to an insane situation had a point.

It is not the freedom of speech, but the perversion of speech and the inversion of morality that encourage “madness” and mayhem.

All this doesn’t mean that “crazies” that kill are not fully aware of right and wrong: they are.

We are all exposed to what I’ve described. And we are all free to determine how we react to this distorted discourse; namely to the discrepancy between words and what they actually describe.

On Grief And The Aggrieved

Crime, Democrats, Etiquette, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, our masters in modern Rome are foregoing “partisanship” (read principle) and are coming together to spend funds not their own to secure their sorry asses against the statistically minuscule chance that these royal behinds will come to harm. Curiously, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is commending House Speaker John Boehner for being “extraordinary in setting the right tone” for “a more enlightened way.”

“A more enlightened way” than what?” It’s almost as though Larson is the aggrieved party and Boehner a member of the offending group. Both parties have assumed these respective roles.

Indeed: “Republicans are clearly responding as if they feel somewhat incriminated,” said University of Michigan political science professor Lisa Disch. “On the one hand, they are acting very quickly to distance themselves from the incident, but on the other hand, they seem to be feeling as if they have been caught at something; caught at using rhetoric that is incendiary.”

On the topic of grief: A day after their child’s dreadful demise, the parents of the “9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store” were liberally granting interviews.

To me this is unsettling. We once used to grieve privately—at least initially. These days, there is nothing people will not share and express in public, and ASAP. They have no private selves.

This is part of our festering cultural commons.

Neoconservative Kingpin Taps Ryan/Rubio

Elections, Foreign Policy, Iran, Neoconservatism, The State, War

William Kristol is touting Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio as a 2012 presidential item.

What are we to take away from this? “They are both strong on national defense,” Kristol repeated twice to Neil Cavuto with that broad Cheshire-Cat grin of his. Could the neoconservative kingpin be licking his chops for war? Is Iran on the chopping block? What else would make a religious proponent of big government and American manifest destiny so smitten?

Cut to 2000, with Kristol and David Brooks making mischief together—or magic, depending on whose side you’re on. The two collaborated on a piece, “The Politics of Creative Destruction,” in which they argued that McCain would revive, rather than repress, the State.

And who could forget Kristol, over on the op-ed pages of his new editorial home, the New York Times (an appointment that speaks to how cozy the left-neocon cabal truly is), excitedly admonishing mutinous anti-McCain conservatives, while reciting gory poetry in honor of McMussolini. Limbaugh he had maligned as suffering from “McCain Derangement Syndrome.”

If Kristol is this excited, it must mean the promise of killing and carnage.