A man in the arena

I am currently reading Jacob Burkhardt’s “The Greeks and Greek Civilization.” The book is a history of Ancient Greek culture and was written in the 1800s.

It is about time to fill in the black hole in my education and start studying the Classics.

As you know, my dear readers, I put my faith in scotch, Reagan, tax cuts, and God, in that order. I am not the most spiritual of Americans and the damned Religious Right angers me just about every day.

However, this struck me as odd. The City Council of San Francisco has officially condemned a rally of evangelical teens. OK. I assume that this is because of their stance on free love and homosexuality. Of course, I see nothing wrong with being a pervert just enjoy your perversions in private.

A government entity has condemned a religious meeting. That may not be against the 1^st Amendment but it sure undermines the spirit of Mr. Madison’s words. And someone please explain to me how a government can condemn the religious and yet can’t stop Nazis from marching?

From MSNBC:

“Anti-immigration sentiment has always simmered, and it flares up about once a decade—the last time it hit this level was 1996, when California Gov. Pete Wilson made it the centerpiece of his failed presidential campaign.”

I am all for immigration, damn it. I am against illegal immigration. I am against people who break the law. This is not hard to differentiate.

Where were the anti-war protestors when Clinton bombed Iraq? Where were they when we bombed Kosovo?

We cannot discuss this nation’s foreign policy rationally until we realize that the difference between Bush’s foreign policy and Clinton’s is one of degree not kind.

The sheer insanity that we have 11 million people in this country illegally is overwhelming. How did this happen?

“We are a nation of immigrations.” Of course, the big difference here is that my family had to cross an ocean and came here legally.

“Mexicans do jobs that Americans won’t.” Wrong. Illegal immigrants work for less money then Americans. This hurts the working poor.

If you want to protest the laws in the U.S. go for it. If you protest immigration laws by waving a Mexican flag, thanks. Now I know whose side you’re on. I know where your allegiance and heart lie. So why should I support you?

A man caught the biggest bass ever and declined to submit it to the record books. Why? The fish did not grab the bait; the fisherman hooked its fin. And that’s not how you catch a bass.

I am having a moment of crisis. This can happen when it is two in the morning, you’ve run out of scotch and you’re debating whether dry vermouth will taste good in Coke. For your edification it tastes awful. Even the second glass is terrible.

I want to sell my condo, quit my job, drive my car to Texas, and volunteer on Kinky Friedman’s campaign for Governor. We agree on some issues. But who really cares. Nothing I want ever gets passed anyway. I want to work for a guy who says things like this.

"I support gay marriage because I believe they have right to be just as miserable as the rest of us!"

"Got a new campaign slogan," Friedman says with a laugh. " 'Kinky Friedman, he never broke his word to the Indians.'”

He refers to himself in the third person as “Governor” and calls his assistant “Jewford.”

“KINKY 2006: WHY THE HELL NOT?”

“If I win, the first thing I'll do is demand a recount,” and promising that, if elected the first Jewish governor of Texas, he would reduce the speed limit to 54.95.

“I grieve that NASCAR people never go to the lesbians' tea-houses, and the lesbians never go to NASCAR”

“I'd had a number of bad experiences with drugs, one of them lasting for several decades.”

“The Kinkster never likes to say 'fuck' in front of a c-h-i-l-d.”

This will be the best political campaign in history.

Men are the driving force in human history. Women are the nurtures and determiners of this force. Why do we fear this idea? Is it because it is incomplete or because it is too true for our sensibilities?

The great thing about Harvey Mansfield writing a book called “Manliness” is that he called it Manliness. Who in this great country still talks that way?

Of course he is not nearly as old school as J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was still angry about the cultural corruption caused by the Norman invasion of England in 1066 A.D!

If you are still angry about an event that happened a thousand years ago you are a Man of the Right.

Debra Lafave is no longer being prosecuted for her crimes. The county charging her has dropped their case because the witness will not testify. Have no fear Lafave is already serving three years of house arrest and seven more years of probation.

Debra Lafave, at the age of 23, had sex with her student who was 14. This is quite obviously a crime and pathetic. That is not what is interesting.

What is interesting is this: who would argue that this is the same crime if the genders were reversed? It is easy to understand the impulse to kill a man who takes advantage of a teen age girl. Why does this not apply both ways?

I submit that we protect a young women’s sexuality because at the gut level we know it is more personal then a young boy’s sexuality. We suspect that the boy was quite happy he had sex with the teacher, and we suspect that a girl would not feel the same way.

This may be a gender oriented suspicion. A man may remember being quite attracted to a high school teacher. He may also remember a girlfriend who had been taken advantage of at a young age and the damage this caused. This may be that a man understands the primacy of the masculine sexual drive and the often horrible ramifications to women this can entail. The instinctive defense of a girl’s sexuality is based on the memory of a young man’s instincts.

Somebody please give a good reason to vote for a Republican. Sorry, the "Democrats will be worse" argument doesn’t hack it in the era of explosive government growth, expansion of the surveillance of Citizens, the abrogation of Citizens’ property rights, and a botched war.

"We don't have deficits because people are taxed too little. We have deficits because big government spends too much." - Ronald Reagan

What has happened is that the Republican Party became the party of out of control big government. Until the Libertarians and Conservatives take back the party from the political hacks we might as well let the Democrats run things. Will anyone notice the difference? Well, I mean besides the fact that we would have a balanced budget.

Hat Tip: Cal Thomas

Tough girls…

Ahh what can you do…

If you think about for a minute, in the face of these riots and international pressure the Danes are some brave bastards. Their Queen exhibits grace under pressure:

In a statement published April 15, 2005, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark said: “We are being challenged by Islam these years, globally as well as locally. It is a challenge that we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerate and lazy. We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at this time, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance. When we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction.”

If I am right, and I pray that I am not, the coming clash of civilizations will be brutal. And the state of Denmark may raise a flag to rally around.

I have already spent an obscene amount of money on whiskey and wine for Nemesis’s annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities. And I have yet to buy the Tullamore Dew or Jameson.

His wife is going to kill me.

However, she will not kill me, because I hang with the best damn sonofabitches you could ever hope to meet. .

Erin go Bragh!

Annie Proulx is quite angry. The writer of the short story “Brokeback Mountain” is livid that the movie did not win the Academy Award for best picture. I am not sure if this is gutsy or pathetic. What I am sure of is that she has one strange view of American culture.

“We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture.”

Ah ok. You wrote a story about gay cowboys (not that there’s anything wrong with that.) We live in a country that elected an Evangelical Methodist for President. A movie based on a Christian Allegory, “Narnia”, and a rather thrown together mess, stomped on your movie at the box office. Hollywood may be out of touch with American culture, but that is not because it is insufficiently homosexual.

May I re-post? I have new readers and the post below still sums up exactly how I feel. With the exception, that I would purge the limitation of Asian in the last paragraph.

I am Back and I am Mad

Oh yes, I am pissed.

First, we have our President. Allow me to pile on to the attacks about Miers. I don't give a goodgoddamn if Alito is an excellent judge. He'll get approved and the court gets more rational. Hurrah! But when Bush nominates his personal lawyer to the court he told Conservatives one simple thing: He doesn't get it. We don't want judges who are pro-life. We want judges who are pro-Constitution. And running around assuring religious conservatives that she is pro-life is a pro-ignorant move. He doesn't get it. We have a "conservative" President who doesn't have a clue about Constitutional law. Lucky for America, Congress stomped on the nomination fast.

But of course they are idiots too. Since 1994 I have been voting for Republicans for what damn purpose? I seem to remember something about balanced budgets, a flat tax, strong defense, and term limits. I did not vote for extraordinary government deficits, tax cuts without any hope of tax reform, a drastically overstretched military that should have been expanded two years ago, and Congressmen that won't leave office until they have taken enough pork to cause a coronary. A friend asked me "How can we have a Republican President, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House, yet nothing in the Conservative agenda is getting passed?" The answer is that about 40% of the Republicans in congress are principled and the rest are useless. No, they are not just useless; they are dangerous to anyone who truly wants reform.

Don't even get me started about that slack-jawed Alabama judge Roy Moore. Yes yes yes, it is ridiculous that cities are forced to take a cross off of their seal that has been there for centuries. That cross is part an acknowledgement of religion that in no way establishes a specific church. However, this guy put a gigantic 10 Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building. AND he said that he put it there because the 10 Commandments are the moral foundation of our law. No. They. Are. Not.

Mr. Madison was a pretty smart guy. If that was true Jimmy would have written "We the people of the United States in order form a more perfect union, found our Constitution on the Bible." If that was what he meant to write than that's what Jimmy would have written. Judeo-Christian values informed the founding, along with Locke, ancient Greek history, and many other thinkers. There is no excuse to ignore the plain text of the 1st Amendment and attempt to establish a Christian government.

Trust me when I say that you don't want to hear about how depressed I was when I debated gay marriage with my old and dear friend Mikey. It was a fun debate and we both made good points. I laid out an argument against gay marriage based on societal norms, respect for human history, and the idea that you don't alter a 5,000 year institution without a damn good reason. The problem was that Mikey had never heard an argument against gay marriage that wasn't based on Bible quotes. He thought all conservatives were religious fundamentalists. I've known this guy for 15 years! How did we let this happen? How did we let a healthy respect for religion turn to supporting people who want to legislate the Bible into law?

And there is the problem. P.J. O'Rourke's Republican Party Reptiles are hibernating. The Republicans are not the fun smash the Federal government types anymore. The party is no longer about limited government; it is more interested in creating Federal laws to enforce a conservative lifestyle and belief system. Well, count me as a fan of a Conservatism of Debauched Drunkenness. I will not support anything that goes against mixing Quaaludes in your scotch and watching Asian porn!

Remember fusionism? No, no, not cold fusion. That was the energy reaction that created no heat and no energy for that matter. Fusionism was the marrying of libertarian and conservative ideas in the 1950s. It was the underlying philosophy behind modern conservatism. And by “was” I mean to say that it is dead.

The key to fusionism was that conservatism realized that government social policies were mostly counterproductive. Ergo a libertarian freedom protecting government would allow communities to freely flourish in a spontaneous order kind of way.

The whole thing just went the way of the Titanic. To say federal welfare policies are too huge, bureaucratic, and destructive to local government and that they should be ended is something the conservative and the libertarian could agree on. To say the federal government should fund faith-based government social policies is to lose both the libertarians and those conservatives that remember that thing about bureaucracies not working very well. To spend well beyond what is taxed is to create a vastly bigger government then the people are paying for. Once again you have lost those libertarians and conservatives with a memory.

So where do you go if you believe the government is really too big? Where do you go if you understand the necessity of government power and also understand the threat of government hegemony?

I don’t know the answers. And that worries me.

If you wish to understand a man’s actions, his strengths, and his weaknesses then remember your Nietzsche.

“The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”

The Democrats get quite angry when they are accused of being “soft on defense” or of “feminizing foreign policy.” I would get angry if I was accused of this too. Of course if I was a national politician I would probably have a plan for foreign policy. If the Democrats had one maybe they could defend it. If you don’t have a plan, then at least bring in a heavyweight or two to show that you take the issue seriously.

Well, the Democrats have their heavy weight. James Webb has announced that he is running for the Democrat nomination for Senator in Virginia. Webb is a Naval Academy grad, a former Marine, a decorated Vietnam Vet, author, and a former Undersecretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration. Yes, the Reagan administration. He rebuilt our Navy in the 1980s and resigned in protest when Congress mandated cuts in the Navy’s budget.

His exact policy proposals and issues are unknown. He is an old school foreign policy realist who doesn’t want to hear any jibber jabber about spreading democracy. We will have to wait and see what issues he is going to run on. Based just on character and judgment Webb should be running for President.

I can not stop reading Camille Paglia. She is driving me nuts.

Do you think I could convince a 60 year old lesbian with a domestic partner to marry me?

Come on, there is something noble about the futile effort.

Time Magazine December 5^th, 2006 p.36

In an article on illegal immigrants a day laborer is shown arguing with a Minuteman protestor. The day laborer’s face is obscured to “protect his identity.” The Minuteman’s face is not obscured at all. Time Magazine has covered the face of an illegal immigrant committing two crimes, earning untaxed income and being in the U.S. illegally, to “protect” him.

Since when is it socially acceptable for a news magazine to protect a criminal?

A couple of old friends of mine are on the internet. Gary is an old friend and something of a rock star. Of the Cappellas, I have known Chris for some years and he is a very kind person. I had no idea his wife was so beautiful. And I hate him for it.

Resolved: Public and private philosophies are irreconcilable.

There are certain ideas that people consider publicly necessary yet privately they believe are worthless. An example is the debate over abortion. A woman may believe in the right to choose, although if pregnant she would not consider abortion an option. Her public philosophy is pro-choice; her personally philosophy is pro-life. The dichotomy is not hypocritical. She could also accept a gay couple as friends and family, without believing that legalizing gay marriage is a good thing for society. The personal is not the political.

It is totalitarian to demand that the private and public be unitary. The Communists applied their philosophy to the economy, the government, the family, and the individual. The opposite of this should characterize our thinking. A vital part of a free society is the acceptance that one’s personal ideas are not automatically universal laws. More aptly put, freedom is the acceptance of the complexity of the human condition.

OK, my internet access has gotten so spotty, that I am finally giving and calling those bastards at Comcast.

I feel so defeated.

I have recently started to re-read Camille Paglia’s essays. An omnivore intellectual, Paglia is the only readable feminist. And I thought a pro-porn, pro-gay, and pro-prostitution thinker would be the perfect tonic before attending a right-wing roundtable about women.

Before my recent sickness, I found myself in a wonderful apartment located in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of DC having a few drinks. Somehow, who knows how, I got cornered by two women into a gay marriage debate. I promise you I did nothing to encourage the exchange.

Well, my basic point was that we should be very cautious when changing a social institution that has been around for 5,000 years. They put forth the “Greeks Did It” point. This was promptly dispatched by pointing out that the Greeks saw sex in a drastically different way than we do and did not have gay “marriages.” I then ready myself for the polygamy argument, the gays in history argument, etc. They never came.

The discussion quickly shifted to: why does tradition matter? It was a singular moment for your humble author. Tradition or this is how we have always done it, held no water. This feisty young woman wanted to know how the stuff of cobwebs could possibly be a reason for not giving two people a chance to live happily together. In that moment I had a glimpse of the American character.

We live in a society of innovation, from the Model T to Microsoft Windows and from the Constitution to the Civil Rights Act. It is in many ways a revolutionary society. Even the religious impulse that manifests itself in waves is a revolt against the materialism of this free-market society. An innovation society is not bound by a romantic view of the past. This society needs reasons not to change.

One who wishes to conserve, needs to explain in concrete terms why conserving is to the benefit of all. This being the case, Libertarians should feel hope. Theirs is a positive agenda. Change is inevitable; in this country it is encouraged. Of the Founders, Jefferson, the only true revolutionary, would probably smile at the precociousness of his Republic.

The hour is late. I should go to sleep. Unfortunately, the idea of pouring a glass of red wine and watching “The Fellowship of The Ring” is just too enchanting. Good night.

Publishing Mohammed Cartoons: Right, Wrong, Stupid, or All of the Above?

Pat Buchanan writes that is was stupid. Fair enough. Deliberately angering a Billion representatives of a religion known for its fighting spirit does not strike one as very smart. And being stupid I suppose could make the action wrong. However if it wasn’t right it is still a Right to publish freely.

Muslims across the world are calling for Denmark to be held accountable to the laws of Islam. The riots across the Islamic world are well known to everyone. The Danes in question are under state protection.

Questions:

If Sharia can be applied across continents how could it not apply to the country a Muslim actually lives in?

Is there a critical mass of Muslims in a population at which point there will be a wide spread call for Sharia (ask Thailand about this)?

Most importantly: Can an open society exist under the bounds of Sharia?

Note: I was remiss in not commenting on this in December.

Eugene McCarthy passed away late last year, years after he passed out of the American imagination. A pity, because he was one of the great odd-ball politicians that this country produced in the centuries before we began electing talking heads with perfect hair.

It is almost hard to believe when you hear it; the 1968 Presidential campaign began without a single anti-war candidate. That is until Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the race. He ran a shoe-string operation funded by a half dozen millionaires. This operation made such an amazing showing against a sitting President in the New Hampshire Primary (which is what engraved first in the nation status on that Primary, by the way), that Johnson gave up the election three weeks later. McCarthy would lose the nomination, but he shattered the Democratic Establishment.

Aside from being a Giant Killer, McCarthy was a throwback to a different time. He was a product of a liberal arts education. A published poet, he had even spent time studying to become a monk. He was aloof, dispassionate, bold, and resilient. He could care less what you thought. This liberal Democrat voted for Reagan in 1980 because “nobody could be worse than Carter.” R.I.P.

“It ought to be a major intellectual event in constitutional law when a Justice of the Supreme Court comes forward publicly to explain his theory of judging. Explanation is needed, for by now nobody familiar with the work of the Court believes it confines its rulings to the principles of the historic Constitution.”

Bam!

I get it now. Bork was just too honest to get through the Senate. The Bloviators cannot stand to see their antithesis.

I have been trying to do research on corporate tax breaks. The damn U.S. Tax Code is 7500 pages long! It reads as if it was badly translated from Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

This hurts too much to finish right now.

I was recently pointed towards an interesting site “Poetry Daily.” The daily poem today is “Elegance." The author does an amazing job bringing out the grace and beauty in a decaying scene.

Hat Tip: Fey Accompli

“Linoleum

Supports my head

Gives me something to believe”

- NOFX

In this hour of my sickness, I recall these lyrics from NOFX. Although the song is about sleeping on your floor because that is all you have, not about being so violently ill that the coolness of your bathroom floor is your only place of refuge.