Quit the Franchise

In the land of franchises, all hamburgers are created equal. Walk into any McDonalds in the world and you'll receive the same food, served in the same way. Uniformity is the sine qua non of a franchise.

A political party is a franchise. If you belong to that party you are a licensee. Your thinking must comport with the party line.

Try this simple social experiment. Bring up the name of Sarah Palin before a group of Democrats. The effect is similar to introducing baking soda to a container of vinegar. There will be the predictable fulmination.

You could substitute other ingredients, with uniform results. As long as it is the name of someone the party has deemed an enemy, there will be a torrent of vitriol.

In Orwell's 1984, all members of the party were required to attend the two minutes of hate. An image of Emmanuel Goldstein --- the Sara Palin of Oceana -- was projected onto a large screen as the party members screamed and cursed his visage.

The latest name to invoke the two minutes of hate among Democrat party members is Michele Bachmann. As soon as she was deemed an enemy of the party, the word went out. She must be vilified. Without question.

Are her policies bad? Who knows? Who cares? Uniformity of thought obviates the need for ratiocination.

And you thought 1984 came and passed without incident.

Maybe it's time to quit the franchise and start your own business.

Much ado about a mosque

   A group of Muslims has its heart set on a mosque in New York City.


   While mosques are a common sight in the Big Apple, the proposed site for this one happens to be a building destroyed by the undercarriage of one of the airliner-cum-missiles of September 11, 2001. The cause of the building’s ruin renders the claim that it’s close to Ground Zero inaccurate. It is Ground Zero.

   Not surprisingly, the group finds itself opposed. And they have protested the protesters. The gravamen of the muslims’ position is that the seventy percent of America which opposes the mosque are doing so only because it is a mosque.

   The have a point. In fact, I daresay that is the point. Opponents of the mosque who qualify their position by saying it has nothing to do with Islam are cowardly and disingenuous.

   It has everything to do with Islam. Not the decent, patriotic Americans who practice this faith, but those who harbor ill will and malign intent toward our country.

   And therein lies the problem. We can’t, with certainty, say which are which.

   This problem is compounded by those associated with the mosque. Their words and deeds belie their purported intent. If their purpose is healing and bridging ecumenical relations, why insist on upsetting the seventy percent who oppose it?

   We found ourselves on the horns of a similar dilemma during World War II. Most people of Japanese extraction were loyal and patriotic Americans. But there were also spies and saboteurs. We couldn’t tell which were which.

   Left with no alternative, we placed the burden of proof upon the Americans of Japanese extraction, and sequestered them in internment camps. Of course, they protested. But it was both their words and deeds that cleared up the confusion for us. They vociferously denounced the country of their origin, and enlisted en masse to fight it. And they were soon exonerated.

   You see how simple it can be?

Orion's Lament

   Hunters are now the hunted.


   There was a time when hunting was so pervasive a part of American culture, it transcended all strata of society.

   Presidents hunted; Roosevelt (you know which one) and Eisenhower, to name a couple. Celebrities; Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn. Audubon hunted. Hemingway hunted. So did the guy next door who worked at the same factory as your dad. Different places on the line, though.

   Today, hunting carries the sour odor of cave dwelling.

   What caused this shift?

   Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century proto-progressive, first posited the notion of animal rights. Curiously, Bentham insisted, by contrast, that humans had no natural rights.

   In the age of Rousseau, Bentham’s ideas were antipodal to the trends which inspired both the French and American revolutions.

   He was a statist, a misanthrope, and all in all, a strange and bitter little man. Naturally, the progressive movement canonized him, along with Margaret Sanger, John Dewey, and Woodrow Wilson.

   But Sanger was an arch bigot; a devotee of eugenics and the Nazi party. Dewey concocted the pseudo-philosophy of Pragmatism. In a nutshell, Pragmatism means compromising your principles in order to get along at a bargaining table. It’s sort of a morality play for people with no attention span. Woodrow Wilson, whose salient accomplishments included WWI (directly), the Sedition act (criticize the war and you went to prison), the Palmer Raids, and WWII (indirectly) was a Benthamite who viewed inalienable rights as ‘mere sentiment’.

   Of course, Bentham was as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. Nonetheless, his ideas held fast and were used to weave the rubric of the Progressive movement.

   The anti-hunting movement is part of that rubric. Once the stuff of scattered loons, it’s gone big time today.

   Its flawed premises drive a passel of reductio ad absurdae. PETA equates chicken coops with Auschwitz. They re-name fish ‘sea kittens’ to coerce school children to condemn fishing. And they’ve convinced pulchritudinous female celebrities to shed their clothes as a means of protesting the use of fur for garments. Ok, so not everything they do is bad.

   Shelters will refuse to allow a person to adopt a dog if it is to be used for hunting --- even though this may mean euthanasia for the dog.

   And environmental extremists were spiking trees in the 1980s, to discourage logging -- a practice that in at least one instance, had lethal results.

   Anti-hunting sentiment is hypocritical nonsense. The ranks of vegetarians have not swelled. In fact, most anti-hunting liberals continue to eat fish and meat. Including veal. Deer, fish, and game birds are not, to my knowledge, kept in a tiny box for their entire lives. And as John James Audubon opined, “a species cannot be hunted to extinction. Only the destruction of their habitat can achieve that.”

   I don’t know if we will go the way of England, where there is a full-scale de facto ban on hunting, but it would be sad if we lost yet another cultural aspect that distinguishes us as purely American.

   We're not citizens of the world; that is a contradiction in terms. We are citizens of the United States.

   And hunting is in our cultural blood.

JDF
8.16.10

Pisces Rising

   First there were fish. They were stylized and tasteful; piscine outlines adhered to the reading end of one’s car.


   I got the symbolism. And the intent of the car’s owner to convey his faith to fellow motorists. Tastefully.

   Then came the eyes. They were little crosses, set within the outline of the fish’s head. Still tasteful, even if teetering on the verge of redundancy.

   But then I began seeing legs. Dissenters were displaying fish of their own, modified with evolved limbs, in mocking derision of the original symbols.

   I got the symbolism. And the intent. By what they considered a clever perversion of the original symbol, they were going to let the benighted Christians know what they thought of their superstitions.

   Is this really necessary?

   You may remember the Amalekites from the bible. They were the people that God ordered King Saul to annihilate. This was to include every man, woman, child, and domestic animal.

   What sin, you may ask, did the Amalekites commit that was egregious enough to merit this extreme punishment?

   Glad you asked. The Amalekites, seeking to undermine both the Jews’ own faith in God, as well as the respect other people had for The Chosen, attacked them relentlessly as they wandered across the desert.

   It was an act of ultimate cynicism.

   The lesson is this: You are free to believe what you want. But for those who believe in nothing, it’s not necessary to undermine another person’s faith in order to bolster your own beliefs (or lack thereof).

   It’s cynical.

   And anything but tasteful.

You're a racist, I think.

It's the latest debate technique. When someone disagrees with you, call them a racist.

It's an accusation that permits no rejoinder. Denying it simply makes you appear phony.
Never mind that no one has ever found a racist bone in your body; absence of proof is not proof of absence.

No wonder people quail before so powerful a trebuchet. It's regularly leveled against politicians, pundits, security personnel, or even celebrities who need to be taken down a peg. All walk on eggshells to avoid the dreaded label of racist.

Of course it's hard to know when it's being falsely leveled. But it's not hard to know when it's being misapplied. The fact is, most people don't use the term correctly. You'd think that people using the term racist would at least know what a race is. Or isn't.

Here's a primer. There are three races of man. Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongaloid. They are based on distinctive, shared physical traits. 

If you are a member of one race and disparage another, simply because they belong to one of the other two, you, my friend, are a racist. Disparaging a member of your own race doesn't count.

For instance, whites can't be racist toward hispanics. Why? Because they're the same race. They differ only in their ethnicity.

An ethnic group is a people who share a common language and culture. If you speak Arabic and drink turkish coffee spiced with cardamom, you are an Arab. An Arab can be any religion. Muslim, Christian, or Jew.

But animadversion toward someone, based on their religion, is not racist. Nor is it an ethnic slur.

For example, a Christian engaging in ugly behavior toward a muslim, simply because he's a Muslim, doesn't make him racist. Nor is it an ethnic slur. It just makes him anti-semitic.

Do the same thing to a Jew, and you're not racist, ethnocentric, nor even anti-semitic.
Because Jews are not semites. In fact this is one of the most widespread misnomers in the world. No, religion-motivated ugliness toward a member of the 'tribe' is not racist, ethnocentric, nor anti-semitic. It is just low class. As is all personal attack.

Including spurious labels of racism.

Economics ad absurdum

Here's a good one. Four hundred billion to stimulate the economy. The economists shilling for the federal government swear this stuff actually works. It must. They have PHd's and expense accounts bigger than your IRA.


Who are we to argue? If they say it was necessary to save the economy, well, it must have been.

Here are some things they haven't mentioned.

First, these government economists are, to a man, followers of the Keynesian school. Know anything about Keynesian economics?

Here's a sampler. It's a little gem called the Saver's Paradox. It postulates that saving money depresses the economy. That's because saving money removes it from circulation. So only profligate spending your hard earned money will stimulate the economy. And if you don't spend enough, the government will step in and spend even more of your money. About four hundred billion, or so.

Now, you probably already see the problem with this logic. It might be true, only if people were stuffing their money into mattresses, or burying it in coffee cans out behind the kids' swingset.

But they don't. They put their money in banks. And the banks loan the money out to capitalize businesses, meet payrolls, and buy and sell goods.

Ergo, the more you save, the more aggregate wealth the country amasses. Spending, on the other hand is just money circulating without working.

You know this. So why don't the economists and politicians? Simple. You earn money. Budget money. Save money. Invest money. They just read about it. Any money they ever had, came from you.

Think about it.