Washington Rebel

Uncommon Knowledge: Soft Despotism with Paul Rahe

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Gunnar Myrdal predicted the downfall of social welfare systems.

What We're Reading

Gonna get started on Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, followed by the Education of Henry Adams.  Hope to get 'er read in 3-4 weeks.

If you care to join in, you're welcome.

Last one is a logger!

Miss Ferris has agreed to lead the class!

For Our Logger Friend, Fuchs

 
Fuch It

Thanks to our Buddy Fuchs -- a genuine Rebel -- for trying to get a conversation started around here.

That's been our hope, you know.  To get a regular Belmont Ruckathon going on at Washington's rowdiest blog:

Washington Rebel.

Cicero himself said he'd prefer less newsin' and more Fuch'n.

Thanks, Fuchs.

Soul Power

Eric Olsen Interviews Andrew Breitbart

One of the biggest -- I guess, the biggest -- change in my lifetime on the American landscape has been the destruction of intelligent conversation.  From the bumperstickerism of the Left to the reflex anti-governmentalism on the right, the shouting on Oprah and FOX News, et cetera, good old-fashioned conversation has gone to hell.  Why?  There's no one reason, so far as I can tell.

In this interview, Breitbart and Olsen are having an actual conversation, which makes it worth watching for that alone.  The other reason to watch it is that Breitbart threatens to bring back shows like the kind I saw when I was a kid:

Mike Wallace Interviews Mortimer Adler

And see an older post of mine: Gorged and Dangerous in which the loss of genuine communication is mourned.

Peace

What is Consciousness?

In 1972, TV was taken from my family and replaced with Silence, books, and conversation.  When next I went to town to visit town friends, who joked about television commercials and swapped one-liners from prime time, I was able to measure something that had taken place: my world had expanded beyond the confines of the Hoh Ranger Station; theirs had shrunk to the confines of a little box.  Pretty startling realization for a 15-year-old!

What before had been a mere mania -- reading books -- now took on somber respectability, and it opened a wonderful door for me:

CONVERSATION

Let me give you an accurate diagnosis of what has happened in America: the average American is not at peace in solitude; the average American is not at peace in Nature; the average American is not at peace with the responsibility of self-correction as a virtue.

The average American is insane.

Conservatives, on balance, are relatively more sane, but only by a margin.  "Liberals" who make it their business to manage others are stark raving mad.

You.  Need to find peace.  And you can't do it until you unplug from the madness that has stolen your soul.

Let the fires of Vesta be ignited in your Soul.

Dreary encrusted leftoidal Seattle: a town without a new idea in 35 years

Ex Seattle-Lefty Speaks Out

I wish I could say more unambiguously that I am still a man of the left, but I can't. I may still feel like a man of the left but I know I don't pass muster with the contemporary left, especially Seattle's auto-pilot version of the same. After 9/11 I didn't like liberals embracing the weirdest ideas of the 1970s Socialist Workers Party, to wit, America brought 9/11 upon herself; I was repulsed by liberals agreeing, in spirit if not in word, with the jihadist attackers that, yes, fundamentally, America deserved it.

So the door kicked open. Or, put another way, I had gained some distance on my former thinking. Now I behold Seattle's encrusted leftism, and brain-dead liberalism everywhere.

Exhibit A: Seattle's National Public Radio feed, KUOW. Have you listened to a KUOW morning interview program lately?

Monday morning: we learn that Seattle water is fatally polluted by an exogenous charcoal bug. It will kill all the fish in a year and us in five.

Tuesday morning: we learn that our local air is fatally polluted by a local smelting firm. Unfortunately the firms' owners' pockets are deeply crammed with local politicians and there is nothing to be done. We'll all be dead in three years. In the second half of the program BBC World reports that an Egyptian waiter hates America. As does a French farmer and a Syrian newspaper editor. Basically the world hates America but maybe, sigh, just maybe, president Obama can get the world to like us. You know, the way it did back in...ah...you know......ah.....

Wednesday morning: we learn that impacted uranium is being carried across the city by airborne viruses and rain drops. Evil corporations are to blame and we'll all be dead in five years.

 

Thursday morning: we learn Seattle's parks are hopelessly, uniformly infected with Soylent Blue Virus. This is the legacy of Seattle's merciless and corporate logging past that has stayed in the soil and infected it beyond remediation. All our children will be dead in five years.

Friday morning: Group discussion by local liberal media eggheads. Seattle councilman X hates councilwoman Y. Seattle corporations are evil. Jihadists are indeed bad but not as bad as republicans. Republicans are evil. We'll all be dead in five years.

I picture an ordinary Seattle housewife, say a stay-at-home or part-time working mom, living in a liberal neighborhood like Ravenna. How does she keep from going stark raving mad after listening to this downer, politically correct drivel day after day? It seems to me the republican party could reconstitute itself by just enjoying life everyday. Make that your next political platform: We kind of enjoy life a bit! You'd have it all over the contemporary left. Instead, you go over to National Review Online and you've got all the conservative commentators fretfully picking over the 20 Best Conservative Movies of all time.

When Adoration Replaces Manhood

America's Fatal Attraction 

"In 1963, American students reached the apogee on SAT tests and international exams in science and math vis-à-vis foreign competitors. By 2009, the U.S. students scored near the bottom in these international tests, notwithstanding an enormous increase in educational spending in the last four decades.

"There are days when I think it would be best if I could remain asleep in 1965. The nation was somewhat innocent, as was I. Socialism was a concept mocked here and abroad, even in the Soviet Union by home-grown intellectuals. The United States was a hegemon on the world stage, often criticized, but also recognized as a world power. It was inconceivable that any president, in the presence of world leaders, would apologize for the transgressions in American foreign policy."  Herbert London, What is American in 2009?

America's problem is not voting districts, or economics, or social or criminological or any of those things Democrats equate with "justice", a word they prefer to freedom, which for them means power.  America's problem is that she has lost her way -- especially Democrats!  I say that as someone who came from a long line of 'em.  Here is an example of something I think about when dealing with agents of the state in the work that I do:

From Neglect to Recklessness

 The Mystery of the Cathedrals

Finally received a copy of the Mystery of the Cathedrals by Fulcanelli.  Maximus recommended it.   Also on my plate are Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James, recommended by my friend DAS, and the Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, recommended by Hoh River Boy.  Before I tell you what I'm seeing in my beloved America, compare these two quotes:

Republic of Virtue

Earn This

I've really been enjoying this Teaching Company program, Founding a "Republic of Virtue."  Robinson points out that our Founding Fathers were not only some of the best educated, most widely read individuals in the history of the world, they were also practical men.  This isn't some historical fantasy.  It is fact.

What did these self-taught geniuses study?  Failed republics.  Why do republics fail?  When their people no longer have republican virtue, i.e., self-direction, honesty, and . . . . Liberty.  Liberty is the key ingredient, and by Liberty I don't mean license.  Professor Robinson points out:

At the time of the founding, Colonists were not rugged individualists but communitarians.  They understood their obligations to be chiefly to each other, putting self-interest aside; they believed themselves to be members of a commonwealth, premised on Christian (puritan) principles.

My friend DAS and I have frequent disagreements over this.  I say America has lost her republican virtue, plain and simple.  How can you explain the large percentage of people who look upon Jesus Obamasattva as their savior?  I don't know who you folks are.  I wouldn't let you pet my dog.

On the other hand, I accept that my country is lost.  I don't hate Obama.  Far from it.  As a superficial man of contrived character, he is fascinating, to the same depth all covers on People's Magazine are fascinating.  He's not a true man, not in the sense of a Harry Truman or The Forgotten Man.  He's a school boy with a big ego that manipulates suckers.  I've had the privilege of knowing true men.  Obama isn't one.  What do you want me to say?

Wendell Willkie 1940 Presidential Election

I live in a country that no longer knows the difference between a schoolboy and a man.  And I accept that.

Want to know what a real republican looks like?

Here Ya Go.

The Spirit of Liberty: Baron de Montesquieu

 Baron de Montesquieu: The Spirit of Laws.

Liberty is the Nurse of Heroes.  Per Daniel M. Robinson, Founding a Republic of Virtue: "Virtue was understood as that formation of character that has one behave under the light of his own reason, properly understanding what the risks and the stakes are.  Virtue is tied in with what one does voluntarily, with what one takes upon oneself voluntarily.  Thus, in the absence of freedom, there can be no virtue.  That is, to do the bidding of another, is not to be virtuous, it's to be obedient."

From Book IV of the Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu:

Of Education in a Republican Government. It is in a republican government that the whole power of education is required. The fear of despotic governments naturally arises of itself amidst threats and punishments; the honour of monarchies is favoured by the passions, and favours them in its turn; but virtue is a self-renunciation, which is ever arduous and painful.

This virtue may be defined as the love of the laws and of our country. As such love requires a constant preference of public to private interest, it is the source of all private virtues; for they are nothing more than this very preference itself.

The Spirit of Liberty -- Edmund Burke's Speech of Reconciliation

Edmund Burke's Speech to Parliament on Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775

The following paragraphs from Burke's Speech on Conciliation should be comprehensible to any American high school graduate.  Test yourself.  See how much of John Kerry's nuance you have at your disposal!  I have "embiggened" the parts that are especially relevant to Gorged and Dangerous.

There is, however, a circumstance attending these Colonies which, in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward. It is that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude; liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the Southern Colonies are much more strongly, and with an higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty than those to the northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In such a people the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.

Gorged and Dangerous

 

The Death of Democracy is Not Likely to Be an Assassination From Ambush. It Will Be a Slow Extinction From Apathy, Indifference, and Undernourishment

Clearly we have entered an age where the trivial, the superficial, and the picayune are regarded as bright shiny wonders for squawking, democratic magpies of all variety.  As a nation we have dwindled to morally shallow, intellectually stunted pomeranians.  The consequence to us all is the loss of genuine conversation, such as you see in this video featuring Mortimer Adler:

How to Read a Book

Homogenized by Pap

 

And Spengler is . . . .

Youth culture, I argued, was an oxymoron, for culture itself was a bridge across generations, a means of cheating mortality. The old and angry cultures of the world, fighting for room to breath against the onset of globalization, would not go quietly into the homogenizer. Many of them would fight to survive, but fight in vain, for the tide of modernity could not be rolled back.

That dark and delightful essayist at Asia Times -- "Spengler" -- revealed his identity this last April.  He gets no arguments from me.  The elders in my time were the Greatest Generation.  They were hard-bitten realists determined to give their kids a better life than they had.  They did not lie.  Saw no reason to.  What they wanted, they earned.  When you are determined to earn, rather than whine with envy, you don't lie.  Their party, the Democratic Party, has been commandeered by velvet-fisted fascists demanding conformity, punishing individuality.

The culture I have inherited is an angry, agitated, superficial one, rather like a teenager with Bi-polar disorder.

Principle vs. Personality

Neil Postman in the Late 1990s, Part I

Here are the opening paragraphs from his Foreward to Amusing Ourselves to Death:

We were keeping our eye on 1984.  Whe the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves.  The roots of liberal democracy had held.  Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

Democratic Scramble

  

Riehl World: "Inside, [Obama] is a very weak man, rather unsure of himself and uncomfortable with the world outside, no matter what image he tries to project."

A lot of people are, like myself, embarrassed that the President of the United States has to diss Bush, make smart-aleck references to FOX News, and throw spitwads at Rush Limbaugh.

Why did you elect this man president?  Shouldn't you have let him grow up first?

My friend DAS and I took up a familiar theme today: Is Obama stable?  Truly?  He's one of those blokes who has lived an entire lifetime to play the role of Princess.  What motivates someone to wear the Big Tiara without any reference whatever to experience? (And why do "citizens" indulge that vanity?)  As Riehl puts it:

When men that weak are given a lot of power, it rarely if ever is a good thing. If the press ever turns on Obama, the fall-out will be incredible.

But the only way to genuinely reveal this man for what he is, is to take him on. Eventually he'll crumble like a house of cards. Unfortunately, most Republicans are so politically insecure in their own right, they aren't stepping up.

Could that reckoning come with the complete collapse of our dollar?

Hat Tip, Liberal Guy

Will Obama cry?

Avoiding Ideology (for the moment)

 

You've Just Told Your Date You're Republican!

My breath is stopped at times when I talk to a young lawyer friend of mine who is genuinely intelligent, and earnest, yet blind as Mrs. Connor's pig when it comes to discussing how deeply propagandized he's been.  Take Steven Colbert as just one example.  Colbert is funny, but I don't regard him as intelligent, if by "intelligent" you mean deep, resonant, and wise.  He's funny in a superficial, adolescent way.  Like so many of the "progressive" and enlightened, he just doesn't seem trusthworthy.  He doesn't seem manly.  He looks and acts like an aging teenager.  Being funny and juvenile is one thing.  But is it "intelligent"?  My young friend probably can't answer that question honestly, since he seems to regard Colbert as some sort of oracle.  As we're living in a time when school-girl hysteria passes as "science", no, I'm not surprised.

I enjoy watching Colbert's repartee with guests, but there's no mistaking the consistent, sometimes subliminal, theme: Conservatives, even if likable or respectable, are dumb.  As my friend is under 30 years old, that's about all he's ever really been exposed to in terms of political conversation.  In other words, it is no conversation at all:

Researching Genius

 

Dr. Ralph Smedley, Founder of Toastmasters

Many was the time in this world I've had reason to be grateful for my years in Toastmasters.  I didn't realize until recently what the main Toastmaster lesson was for me:

There are two kinds of people in this world: the critical kind, and the constructive kind.

Toastmasters encourages people to develop their innate talents because it is founded on constructive principles. Toastmasters Founder Ralph Smedley took troubled, and sometimes criminal, boys and proved that you can turn Sad Sacks into Champions by . . . . encouraging their God-given genius.

As opposed to condemning them.

The Unspeakable Name of God

 

The White Goddess:  Did Robert Graves steal the idea from his Squeeze?

In ancient Ireland the ollave, or master-poet, sat next to the king at the table and was privileged, as none else but the queen was, to wear six different colours in his clothes.  The word 'bard', which in mediaeval Wales stood for a master-poet, had a different sense in Ireland, where it meant an inferior poet who had not passed through the 'seven degrees of wisdom' which made him an ollave after a very difficult 12-year course.  The position of the Irish bard is defined in the seventh-century Sequel to the Crith Gabhlach Law: 'A bard is one without lawful learning but his own intellect'; but in the later Book of the Ollaves (bound up in the fourteenth-century Book of Ballymote) it is made clear that to have got as far as the seventh year of his poetic education entitled a student to the 'failed B.A.' dignity of bardism.  He had memorized only half the prescribed tales and poems, but had not studied advanced prosody and metrical composition, and was deficient in knowledge of Old Goidelic.  However, the seven years' course that he had taken was a great deal more severe than that insisted upon in the poetic schools of Wales, where the bards had a proportionately lower status.  According to the Welsh Laws, the Penkerdd, or Chief Bard, was only the tenth dignitary at Court and sat on the left of the Heir Apparent, being reckoned equal in honor with the Chief Smith.

Ayn Rand on Savages and Gentlemen . . . or Something Along those Lines!

  

Rebel Cheesecake

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Ayn Rand

The Specter of Kimball Haunts America

 

George Washington: Another Dumb Ass Conservative!

A specter is haunting America — the specter of freedom. Even as President Obama proceeds with his efforts to impoverish the country, the productive classes of society are waking from their dogmatic slumbers and banding together.  Roger Kimball, The Real Culture War, 21st Century Style.

Let's hope Kimball is on to something.

Similarly, Dr. Mark Hendrickson predicts that Obama may be overloading his ass with his mouth -- as they say -- in Two Achilles Heels.

And Dr. Sowell gives us insight into his intellectual ripening in Mind Changing Books

Remembering Bud Hanify

   

Photo of "Ranger Bud" by Sam "What Ranch?" Nugent, aka the Mango Whisperer

Those were magic days, all right, when my Old Dad Charles B. "Bud" Hanify was the Hoh Ranger.  Although I've included considerable detail about me Da in my book manuscript, the following sketch is one of the nicest tributes I've ever seen (or heard) about my Dad.  Comes from childhood friend, Sue Tinney -- one of the major talents behind Gaia Consort.  This particular piece was included in the collaborative effort, Fast Moving Water.

Thanks, Susan.  And, uh, by the way . . . I remember you Tinney kids kiping money out of Taft Creek!  Heh.

The Speech of the Grail

 

Hoh Rain Forest

In 1972 we moved to the Hoh Ranger Station inside Olympic National Park.  I was 15-years-old. 

My father, Bud Hanify, started as a National Park Ranger in 1940; his father went to work for the Olympic National Park when it opened in 1938, building road.  My granddad's folks were from Ireland.  It always struck me as Providential -- ' kismetic' -- that he would be drawn to a place as green, or greener, than Ireland.