UPDATED: Mitt Romney: Elements Of A Tragic Figure

History, Literature, Morality, Nationhood, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans

Mitt Romney embodies some, not all, the elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure:

* Character must be a person of stature. (Check)
* Character must neither be totally good or totally evil
* An error of judge or a weakness in character causes the misfortune. (Check)
* The character must be responsible for tragic events.
* Action involves a change in fortune from happiness to misery. (Check)
* Subject is serious. (Check)
* Tragic hero is of noble birth and displays a nobility of spirit. (Check)
* Protagonists pitted against forces beyond their control. (Check)
* Struggles courageously until his fall. (Check)
* Though defeated, gains a measure of increased wisdom.

Mr. Romney’s election concession speech speaks to these tragic elements, especially this man’s abiding faith in “this great nation.”

I so wish — I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader. And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.

UPDATE (11/7): We “left everything on the field,” Romney said, adding “we have given our all to this campaign.”

This comports with the prototypical Greek tragic figure who “struggles courageously until his fall.” Meantime, the snake in the grass coiled and hissed and spat venom, all the way to a victory.

Exercising A Right Over Others

Democracy, Elections

PBS’s Christina Bellantoni cites a poll (which I can’t locate on PBS News Hour’s usually well-organized site), according to which individuals earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.

Single women and racial minorities are with Obama too. (Understandably, categories overlap.)

People with higher incomes are in the minority. They are an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). The rich dominate the economy, the poor dominate the polity.

When elections roll around, the voting mass exacts its revenge against the economically dominant minority.

The economically dominant minority funds government. The rich pay most of the taxes. Obama is the candidate who, on paper at least, has promised his special constituencies more of what richer people rightfully own. Mitt Romney is the candidate who, on paper at least, promised to confiscate less private property.

That is, at least, how the voter perceived the candidates.

Answer me this, then: What kind of a right is the vote? What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life?

In this democracy (for we are no longer a republic), you vote not for a representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich, whom The Left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being, you vote defensively. And if you are The Poor, you vote, indirectly, to extract what your guy has promised you from The Other Guy.

In a word, pillage politics.

When Looks Can Kill

Ethics, Family, Islam, Media, Middle East, Morality, Multiculturalism

When honor killings are mentioned in the moron media there is but one narrative: “bad man, good woman – Arab men refuse to let go of patriarchal privilege and power; Arab women are the besieged political class who desperately want to – but can’t – protect their daughters from this fate. But does this represent what is really going on in Arab cultures?”

BBC News reports that a couple in Pakistan-administered Kashmir was arrested for “killing their 15-year old daughter with acid,” for fear that “she would bring dishonour on their family.”

The couple told BBC that the girl had glanced at a boy. The father proceeded to beat the girl, while the mother fetched acid and poured it over her daughter Anusha, who sustained burns on 60% of her body.

Let these events be a lesson to those who think that parental love is a universally shared value.

From “THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL FEMINIST” (December 5, 2003):

Here’s what a “Palestinian” woman, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud, did to her child, after the girl – who had been raped and impregnated by her brothers – refused to commit suicide.
Plastic bag, razor, and wooden stick in hand, the mother entered her sleeping daughter’s room. “Tonight you die, Rofayda,” the wicked witch announced, before wrapping the bag tightly around the girl’s head. The murderess Qaoud then spent the next 20 minutes slicing away at Rofayda’s wrists, ignoring pleas of “No, mother, no!” Just to be sure, this alleged mother struck her daughter on the head with the stick after the poor child passed out. Yet members of Qaoud’s community are nonplussed – they see the woman as driven by devotion to both community and family.

Anthropologist Ilsa Glaser’s eye-opening work on female aggression in the Palestinian Authority more than confirmed that women were active in instigating the honor killings … yes, of their daughters.

Read on.

UPDATED: Libertarians And The Vote

Canada, Democracy, Elections, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, The State

New American columnist Jack Kerwick is blasting non-voting libertarians. (I have an excuse: I have chosen to decline citizenship of Police State USA. I’m a permanent resident, but not a US citizen. I am, however, an American patriot. I don’t need Uncle Sam’s imprimatur or papers to be a patriot.)

I think Jack is making an argument that is similar to the one made in “LIBERTARIAN WRANGLING”:

From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, …they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who, while fleeing the law, happens on a scene of a rape, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because a murderer has performed it?

Writes Jack:

“Romney, along with his fellow partisans, has pledged to repeal ObamaCare. “Would that be evil? [NO] He also wants to make America more energy independent. [Note: Libertarians want energy production, not necessarily energy independence, for the latter would imply a rejection of the logic of trade. It’s “drill AND trade, baby, trade.”] Would this be evil? A Romney administration would engender an environment dramatically more business-friendly than any that we could ever expect from an Obama administration. Would this be evil?”

The answer is no.

Basically, Jack Kerwick wants to shatter the pretense of ideological purity that allows libertarians (like myself) to stand outside of politics.

It’s a good debate. We should have it. (If I were cleared to vote, I doubt I would vote for the loopy Gary Johnson.)

UPDATE: Joseph Farah feels the same urgency that Jack Kerwick does: “It’s a matter of self-defense and self-preservation,” he says. MORE.