At my daughter's elementary school, I once had to complain to a teacher that they were not teaching sentence diagramming. I then made a brief effort to find any grammar book that did. My search was not rewarded. I haven't been as peckish as I should, but now I am starting to recognize the failure now several years out. One of the things that has brought this up is a large paper Scholar has to produce on Maya Angelou's atrocious multicultural abstract Inaugural Poem. Aside from the fact that everyone has had to live down the preposterous notion of Bill Clinton as a black president and the poison aspects of maintain a color-coded taxonomy of suffering, it's just a bad poem. They should be teaching about the caged bird. There's a lot of things 'they' should be teaching.
So I've been thinking about learning things the good old-fashioned way and the mortarboards of hard knocks, the pedagogy of Catholic catechism and the indelible lessons of bloodied noses, boxed ears, slapped wrists and swatted behinds. I say so particularly noting how out of touch the reality of a slapped wrist is with its metaphor. If any schoolteacher in this country were to actually slap the wrist of a child, she'd be up on charges. Instead we live in a nation of metrosexual passive aggressives (with their patron saint Obama) who have only suffered the metaphors of black eyes. The only thing they strain is credulity. It is only a matter of time until that subculture of our nation collapses into a sobbing heap. It's already in over its head.
While I didn't intend this message to focus on the character of our two candidates for President, it would be irresponsible for me to pass without noting the startling difference between the two. One is a warrior, the other an attorney. I love Arnold's parody of Obama's skinny legs and scrawny arms. It is perfectly apt.
Spence, my dear friend, has put together a list of 40 or so things that he believes should be the focus of the Executive. I take them to task as a whole for what they leave out. Consider the first ten and my comment in the context of the legacies of liberal politics:
1. Free college tuition. 2. Low interest loans to businesses/homes for energy improvements. 3. Promote micro-loans. 4. Universal preschool. 5. Green public transit. 6. Fund vertical gardens. 7. Fund the Algebra Project. 8. Promote wellness. 9. Create green-collar jobs. 10. Explore Free Government.
I can't help but think of Star Trek's holodeck or better yet, The Construct of The Matrix in which the imagined becomes the realized. Plug an electronic shishkebab into the back of your head, and there's your Algebra Project. You're eyes flutter for a moment, and then you wake up with Newtonian clarity. "I know algebra!" All the physicists at the Pentagon are wasting their time if they're not working to these ends according to the vision of Spence's philosophy. What I say of black politics, I say equally of Progressive politics, it is all about what to do about the marginalized person whose position is the legacy of some oppression. Let's just extend the metaphor a bit to say that the progressive endgame is the 'promised land'. That promised land is squarely in middle class America. There's nothing further - all the I have a dreaming, and we shall overcoming lands Americans in the material world of the American middle class, period. Beyond that, it has nothing to say. Everybody gets free headstart, free college, free algebra competency, jobs that are pollution free, free public transportation, and as close as we can get to free money - low interest loans, surely guaranteed by the government just in case you decide your skinny legs can't bear the burden. They want to turn the middle class of America from a grunting gutteral circus of blood, sweat and tears into a walled garden of polite dancing including a dark corner for the wild thang, just in case people get bored.
But nobody in such a world gets bitchslapped. Nobody gets abused, nobody hits any glass ceilings. All the real oppression is boxed out of the system. You simply register your gripe into the taxonomy of the Angelou Code and are admitted into the new protected class, brought to you by those biters, kickers, screamers, bullies and barbarians who make more than 250k (no wait, 200k) dollars per annum. Welcome to the pain-free zone, all you need is your psychic damage as baggage and your material world is cushioned in the downy softness of Progress. Such is the life charter of those dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the achievement of ever inflating welfare. People don't die of cancer around here. That's *preventable*. We can stop people from smoking. We can stop people from drinking. We can stop people from risking their lives and the lives of other. Hear me y'all. ITS ALL PREVENTABLE. People don't get their wrists slapped around here. We know what that leads to...
What color is authority? And who is bold enough to wear such a color today in America? The cadres of the people for a better future wear the color of Matthew 25:40.
"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
It is for a reason I picked the New International Version of the Holy Bible. The new internationalists will start in America and they will continue their experiment all the way down. If you're living on 100 dollars a year, your day is coming soon, as soon as America is convinced that its wild west competitive days are coming to a well-managed end. Tame this beast and the rest of the world is a piece of cake. We've already got what they want, and we know how to extend life itself.
People tend to forget that doing for the weak is service to a King. It is payment to a regime of truth and the entire engine is powered by the barbarian beast of burden. Those of us outside of the protected class, those of us subjected to a different standard of right and righteousness are to be dumb animals. Our sinew, sweat and slobber don't have standing in the court of Progress. In this moral inversion, we are to be the silent, subservient help, in service to the general welfare of the protected class. Those of us without a color in the Angelou Code of multicultural complaint have no business partaking in the welfare state. If we are beyond the Pale, if we are not part of the Solution, if we engage in risky behaviors, if we dare to use physical punishments, if we are in the Oppressor Class, then we are not men but freaks. We Cheneys, we Rices, we Palins, we Joes are not to be trusted. We who defy the type, we God damned individuals. We who would bother to kick and scrap for more, to thow an elbow in the paint, to dance in the endzone with utter disrespect for the losers behind us. For there is no tribute valued by the King in doing for us. There is only the acceptability of our sacrifice. There is only our submission to the only value that has value which is all about the least brothers.
We who have decided not to be weak are off the list. Watch your back. The King is not happy with your excess.
America is great because it sustains the great. Without them we are just another collection of ordinary people on the planet, no different from the billions already dead. America sustains the great because it frees and protects the individual who must do what he does to become great. But the great are no less mortal than we all are, and anyone can be surrounded. It takes a village to stone an apostate.
Of course we know there's a man going round taking names and gathering up armies in defense of his intention to stone our greater citizens into submission to his schemes of redistribution. He is not the first nor will he be the last, and I am confident that we will survive the attempt. What takes longer is for us to undo the propaganda that led to his gaining a national audience. It is the replication of the meme which is the damage - bad ideas take a long time to kill.
We have the advantage of recognizing his audience in their mendacity. Those like the suicidal man who jumped off the bridge and left a note: Obama, please take care of my family, are easy to spot. If you have fought the communal instincts of liberals before, you know the pattern. If you have found yourself accused of heartlessness by self-righteous altruists, you have seen it all before. If you have seen the open hands and closed faces of the cynical panhandlers then you know the drill. If you have watched the purses opened and money eagerly handed over to the charismatic by the man who spits at the businessman, then you are aware of the hypocrisy. Take a look at that list once again. Who's voting for whom?
There is no real world in the world of the protected class. They're all spoiled American voters. This is a populist pyramid scheme posing as humanitarianism. Ask a Democrat about AIDS in Africa and they will ignore you because there are 47 million Americans who don't have health care *insurance*. It's not that they don't have health care, it's that they don't have *free* health care. Or do I get them wrong, sorry, *affordable* health care. You know, something that doesn't make them sacrifice. God help that the protected class would have to sacrifice, that would make them the same as those strong barbarian biting, kicking bullies, those fist pumping loudmouths that say USA! USA! USA!, those crude triumphalists who have the
nerve to call themselves patriots. The protected class can only defend its weakness and thereby its demands for comfort by pointing out its defects as compared to the strong and the great. Such a sport is easy in America because there are millions and millions of the strong and the great here. It is impossible to make such comparisons against the rest of the world. And that is the reason why the Progressive agenda is only domestic.
The battle between the haves and the have-nots does not take place in America. As soon as you swim north across the Rio Grande, you become a have. You instantly become protected. And it is the welfare of those protected that is the dedication of the Progressive. A fast track to the middle class, as devoid of risk as possible is the aim, and America ain't right until all of the victims of every crime and slight has a body of law and a bureaucracy of government in attendance. It is the dream of every watchdog group to enable a prophylactic wall of 'never again' built with the bricks and mortar of law bore by the backs of the rich under the whip of Progressive politics.
Behind those walls they think they will be protecting humanity but they will not. It will be a prison of dependency and a kindergarten in the world that toughens the soles of those who strive to succeed beyond all programmatic protections. The new jacks won't know life of Jim Crow. They won't know the meaning of 'working your way through school'. They will have never had an asswhooping and they will have never learned the hard way. They will, should these altruists in the thrall of Matthew's King, have had the jagged edges ground smooth, where no red man will have his dignity trampled upon by the roar of a crowd of sports fans. Where no algebra book sits in a library defying initiative and yeilding its secrets under the duress and discipline of one who would be a self-made man. No, there will be a free program for you - just get past those border guards and you're in the home of the free. Remember, we don't talk about 'braves' any longer.
Perhaps I cannot find an English grammar book for my daughter because I'm just lazy. Perhaps I can't find it because we no longer possess the confidence that English might be considered our own official language. I decided instead to make her read Freakonomics to me aloud. I picked the story about crack dealers in Chicago and it nearly brought her to tears. It's a hard lesson of sorts, and I am hard pressed to figure out exactly what a daughter of privilege should learn as a matter of finishing. That's because I'm hard pressed to figure out what kind of society this will be when she is my age. But I will assume that if I teach her how to bite, elbow, risk and hold on pridefully to what she has gained through real effort, she'll come to understand her own worth and what others will try to extract from her without respect. I will then be assured that she has achieved something of real value.
The world always values real work. Some will pay for it, some will try to steal it. If we refuse to let it be stolen, then the engines of tribute to that King of mendacity will quit. Their programs will splutter and fall. On that day they will demand revolution and their thievery will be plain.
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