Nothing Left To Cut

Must be nice for grown, well-dressed men to sit around a long shiny table and wax importantly about worn swatches of their academic expertise, trying to get all the pieces to fit. No matter how much cutting they do, I can guarantee, they will come up short. We’re essentially broke, but let no one even whisper it. They are now down to trading IOU’s in the burnt patches. We’ve long since scraped economic and political bedrock; there’s basically no where left to go.

A while ago the bankers tried the same thing. And it blew up in their faces - as it should.

It’s like having entered a cul-de sac. Only the turning radius of the car we’re driving does not permit us to turn around. The only way out is in reverse.

It’s always difficult to give a shape to something. It’s even harder to abort. There are always egos involved. Sometimes a lost driver will drive hundreds of miles before admitting he had taken a wrong turn back in Omaha. All the issues on the table right now involve destruction - everyone is crying out to be saved. And there are only so many lifeboats.

There are basically two camps at work here. One seeks to promote the illusion that nothing is impossible - that gravity can be reversed; that ice can be made not to melt or water not to freeze. (Stranger things have happened: Just this week, NASA scientists announced they had found a life form that lives on arsenic.) The other seeks to return to an acceptance of traditional cures - like bloodletting. The cynic says it’s already gone to far, that nothing we can do will fix it; that the patient will die in any case. So, let’s just grant him a pain-free passing.

Every one of these points is debatable. Time, however, remains the rub - and it’s egos that time has a habit of suffocating. We should have thought of all that before - while there still was time. Not too long ago it seemed a good idea to kill the economy in favor of votes; as it was a good idea to kill God. Now, we find that all the things we’ve killed off - all that lies scattered in ruins around us - still has the capacity to sting.

The only answer, of course, is to keep cutting; to stay abreast of the rapidly spreading disease. Often, taking a knife to a cancer has the effect of making it more aggressive. …we cut more and more until there is nothing left to cut.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Kanthapura

The hard Left is not only anti-American; they’ve now ratcheted up the stakes and revealed themselves as being anti-human as well: Anything non-human must be preserved and protected at the expense of individuals. To the Left, humans are evil interlopers on a near-perfect planet. It is no wonder that they support abortion, eugenics and land grabs.

There’s something sick in this and the sickness has now spilled over into our politics. Except, they think we’re sick as well. We are often all too quick to accept their premise, after which point they’ve already won the argument.

Environmentalism has become as potent as Islam. When one flies internationally these days, the screen on the back of the seat in front of you shows the aircraft’s progress across the oceans and over the landmasses. The maps fail to show borders. Often there’s a disclaimer, saying that the maps are non-political; that national borders are deliberately omitted. There are so many border disputes at the moment, the airlines thought it best to avoid the issue entirely. Instead, only the locations of towns are given. These then can be seen as city states while the land around them is a kind of no-man’s land - fly-over country - to be randomly allotted to service the cities as is deemed appropriate. Nations are no longer willing to defend national borders. And indeed, the whole concept of national borders is rapidly growing irrelevant.

What is growing in importance is ideology. And ideology knows no borders. It has long been a dream of the Left to erase all borders and become global. The promise is peace. Unfortunately, conflict will never disappear. There will always be killing. In fact, in the absence of borders, wars may become even more virulent and deadly - as in civil war; pitting neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, etc.

How does one fight such a war?

I have recently read “Kanthapura”, a novel by Raja Rao. In it he describes a winning strategy. He details how Gandhi’s influence on the grass roots built an invincible army against which the Crown could not win. The secret was peaceful resistance - with an emphasis on ‘peaceful’.

Most trouble in the world originates with ego. Take ego out of the equation, and one literally becomes invincible. This is a lesson the Tea Parties should take to heart, for the fight is drawing near. As the concept of borders crumbles and the emphasis shifts to ideology, the great armies that have so heroically defended us in the past become increasingly useless. We will need to depend largely on ourselves for survival. Rao’s Gandhi may have shown us the way.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Clash of Civilizations

Paul Harvey used to preface some of his stories by saying, “It’s not one world.” It isn’t. Howard Dean has not suddenly become Republican or conservative. He is and will (most likely always) be a socialist. Hillary Clinton is a socialist. Obama, at the very least, is a socialist. ‘Big government’ is fundamental to socialist thinking.

At the same time, socialists are not suicidal. They do not check their common sense at the door. They know that in order to survive as a viable alternative, they cannot totally ignore certain political realities. For Muslims to build a 13-story mosque in close proximity to Ground Zero is simply a bad idea, unless we fail to understand that Muslims have declared war on us; that they cannot be appeased or bargained with; that any altruistic gesture we might intend will not make them like us, and will be proclaimed a victory for their side, allowing them to propagandize and recruit in continuance of their war against us.

In a recent exchange with a friend about ultimate causes, it came to me that the fundamental difference between man and animal is ego. I had it right, but I did not go far enough.

We’d been putting bones out on the driveway after supper with the expectation of seeing them gone by morning. We’d often wondered just who our nocturnal visitor might be. We imagined any number of the ‘friendly’ animals we’d become familiar with over the years of living here. After an overnight blanketing of fresh winter snow, their various tracks cross the lawn in every conceivable direction. Most of these we can readily identify.

Last night I had to go out for milk. When I returned, I happened to see the interloper in my headlights. I still can’t tell you what it was: larger than a cat; smaller than most dogs; large pointy ears; protruding snout; thin, spindly legs. There have been reports of fox and/or coyote in our neighborhood, but I’ve seen the fox in daylight and it wasn’t that.

I almost felt sorry for the intruder. He looked so frail and wobbly, and nervous to boot. We don’t put scraps out every day. I imagined him coming by on days when we don’t - and being hungry. It also occurred to me that he - as most any animal - had no arms and was obliged to eat directly off the ground. The difference between us, I reasoned, is that we at some point decided to get up on our hind legs and remained that way. This allowed our front legs to develop into arms, hands and fingers with which we could do things. We could now build something and say, “I did that. It’s mine.” - hence, ego.

Thought would develop similarly as well - based on differing assumptions - into different appendages. Ayaan Hirsi Ali in an opinion article in yesterday's WSJ entitled “How to Win the Clash of Civilizations” briefly summarizes the late Samuel Huntington’s assertion that “the essential building blocks of the post-Cold War world are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.

The balance of power among these civilizations, Huntington argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant. Huntington also said that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization.

Ali concludes: “The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans and other Westerners reaffirming their shared civilization as unique—and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western aggressors (sic)."

The Blunt Edge of Brutality

Religion, like language, is hard-wired into the human psyche. At their core, all religions are the same. Religion typically splits into two aspects: spiritual and political. The spiritual aspect of religion is straight forward. Its ‘signature’ is tolerance. It deals with questions regarding faith, God and eternity. The political aspect of religion currently draws most of our attention because it has the potential of affecting our immediate circumstances. The same is true for ‘isms’. We can say that man is in essence a religious animal. Or we can say man is in essence political. Both statements accurately reflect a singularity of the human condition.

While it is true that equating man’s spiritual nature with his political nature is paradoxical, the two are nevertheless inseparable. Mankind is most at ease when the political aspect of whatever his primary concern may be (as Alfred North Whitehead suggests) is benign. A wizened curmudgeon professing his belief in Marxism within the confines of an ivory tower suite is no threat to anyone. Man suffers when such concerns become militant as happened during the crusades and is happening now as militant Islam makes its moves.

The constant striving of religion is to reduce all the divergent aspects of life to one. People who may be several happy meals short of enlightenment do not recognize the essential oneness in what they see. They fail to make the connection that ties everything together. There are two ways to force the issue to its resolution. One is persuasion (proselytizing), militancy and violence; the other is tolerance.

Tolerance is the more difficult nut to crack. We have chosen the easy path. It is easier to lop off the heads of non-believers. It’s easier to ban conservatives from speaking at universities. It’s easier to call for jihad. It’s easier to cause havoc and break things, and then pick up the pieces of whatever is left and cobble these into a single atrocity based on the principle of exclusion. It is also easier getting people to submit.

We here in the West have chosen submission. Our enemies attack us and we submit. In order to rationalize our cowardice, we change the language. We blur the line between good and evil. We assume our enemy’s narrative and admit that we are at fault; that it is we who must adjust or even erase ourselves. Our mea culpas – and even our sacrifices - are flawed; it is only ego that speaks. We abandon our principles; our allies. We no longer tolerate ourselves.

This is the mindset of our current administration. It pays no mind to the violence, pain and dislocation that is certain to ensue. For them, all these comprise the necessary gateway through which we all must pass in order to achieve a more perfect union – the Utopia that is envisioned in James Hilton’s Shangri-La, in B.F Skinner’s “Walden Two”, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc.

In today’s world the concept of tolerance has been all but abandoned. Political strife has taken its place. Unfortunately, just as religion cannot be exorcised from the human psyche, we cannot fight ‘isms’ with ‘isms’ and arrive at a good place. Religion has always been a double-edged sword. We have chosen the blunt edge of brutality.

A Day At The Beach

We have hit another wall. For as long as I can remember, we've been living in the greatest country on earth - the envy of the world. What is the fabled destination of every third-world denizen who's spinning his wheels in the mud of oppression, corruption, racism, and crony capitalism? It's where the streets are said to be paved with gold; where dollars and opportunity beckon soft and ripe like low-hanging fruit. So, they plan for the journey across the several seas. They sharpen their useful skills as to have something to trade when they arrive. And sure enough, they make a life for themselves and write home about it, inspiring others to undertake the journey as well.

It's half a life's work to make that journey. Sometimes, it's not all that easy - that tearing away of the heart from the (home) land. Sometimes they have to settle for their children reaching the top; the children conceived and spawned in the fecund new soil of America.

But where are those already here supposed to go? How do they exercise their hopes, their egos, their wits, impatience, their skills? They're already here, in the greatest place on earth. They take their luck for granted. They too look for new angles to satisfy their intellectual prowess. They too see what’s good in America - but to them it’s a wall. It can’t be moved.

They become politicians, journalists, muckrakers. They look for inspiration overseas. They light fires – small fires at first. Then they graduate to buildings, institutions. They run to the rescue, hoping to be heroes.

Ego. They start to meddle - rearrange things that can’t be rearranged; things that can’t be put back – like diabetes. Now they have a cause. They make new rules. They seek control. They deny themselves meat; they wear hair shirts – ego again. The more they meddle, the worse it gets. They’re overwhelmed.

Then they read somewhere that the path to Utopia must start with revolution. Things are already coming unhinged. They’ve had a part in its unhinging. Ego again. Now, the tearing down becomes a path. They reward and praise each other for essentially nothing – for kicking down the sand castle that’s taken Janie half the morning to build. We’ll have our revolution, by God! We’re tearing it all down. We’re doing something after all.