Uncommon Commentary #449: Don’t Let Our Language Languish

People in general would likely agree that, if one is to do anything, one ought to try to do that thing as well as one reasonably can.  Yet, they seem to feel that this principle does not apply to the speaking and writing of English, and indeed that, while there may be such things as nonstandard grammar and syntax, the concept of substandard usage isn’t even valid; that it’s all just a question of dialect (or of the politically-motivated absurdity called “Ebonics”—As if being Black rendered one incapable of using proper English!).  In the play Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins says: “Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible.”  If George Bernard Shaw (a fine dramatist but a distasteful person overall) understood that good English matters, the average, comparatively respectable person ought to understand it also.

Miscellaneous Musing #69: I’m a Mongoloid, Idiot!

Is it because people in the USA have such poor knowledge of geography and history nowadays that they refer to members of the Mongoloid race of our species as “Asians”, as if all the peoples of Asia were Mongoloid?  If one is reluctant to use “Mongoloid” (which, like “Caucasoid” and “Negroid”, is a scientific term), one could refer to US citizens of Chinese, Korean, Indochinese, &c. ancestry as East Asian or Far Eastern; even these words are imperfect, since, e.g., the Ainu of northern Japan are considered to be mostly Caucasoid, but they would be satisfactory for informal speech.

Uncommon Commentary #448: A President with Precedent

One observation that I have made about Bill Clinton (though not here on the Doman Domain) is that he was not only a bad president but the worst kind of president that we could have had then.  The end of our Cold War foe the USSR in 1991, and that of the last previous recession 20 months before Clinton’s election, meant that the most pressing problem facing the USA at the time of his inauguration was one not of economic or foreign policy but rather of domestic policy: the collapse of Christian standards of morality.  What we needed in the 1990’s was a chief executive who would understand that we were in a moral crisis that endangered our civilization (as it still does), and who would have enough strength of leadership and personal integrity to pull Uncle Sam out of his swan dive into the Lake of Fire.  What did we get instead?  “Slick Willie”.
Just as Clinton was the worst kind of president that we could have had then, Obama is the worst that we could have now: a man who, while his country is at war versus Muslim terrorists, denies that there even is such a thing as a Muslim terrorist; and one who, while his country is running up a larger debt than any other in history, tells us that the way forward is for the US government to spend even more money than it already does.  One way to guarantee that the USA continues its decline is to keep choosing the wrong person for its highest office, and we the people seem determined to do precisely that.

Miscellaneous Musing #68: Not Founded on, but Confounded By

For years I’ve been wondering just where people got the idea that the United States of America was “founded on Christian [or “Judeo-Christian”] principles”.  Perhaps it has a quasi-historical basis; the Second Great Awakening is reckoned by some as a motivation for the Revolution, and some of the Puritan sects of the Seventeenth Century had a democratic character and therefore might be adduced as evidence of a connection between Christianity and our Revolution, which, however, was not really so “democratic” as people today think it was. (I say “quasi-historical” because, in my opinion, neither any Great Awakenings nor any Nonconformist denominations had any influence whatsoever upon the founding of the USA.  I might write more on this topic on another occasion.)  It could also be merely that readers of the founding documents of the USA make the same mistake that I did at approximately age 18.  Reading through the Declaration of Independence, I was impressed by the multiple mentions of God made therein; as I learned more of history and religion, though, I realized the significance of the fact that the Declaration nowhere mentions God simply as “God”, but always calls Him “Nature’s God” or “the Creator”; this betrays the opinion of Eighteenth-Century Deists like the document’s author, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the Deity created the universe and established the physical laws by which it functions, but takes no further part in its operation.  This attitude is not atheism in the sense of a doctrine that God does not exist, but it’s not Christianity (or Judaism, or any other organized religion) either.
I know that those who write or say that the USA was “founded on Christian principles” are trying to fight the Culture War, and I sympathize with them; but I have a passion for the truth, and so it troubles me when people delude themselves, and there’s no question that this idea is a delusion; the founders of this country were products of their era, the misnamed Enlightenment, which was anti-Christian.  Furthermore, it’s hard to win any kind of war without waging it intelligently, and, unfortunately, the people who have heretofore led the effort to turn our country back toward God—the generals, so to speak, in the Culture War—have been super-patriots who seem to think that the solution to any problem facing the USA is to somehow “return to the principles of the Founders”.  What I’m trying to make people understand is that the principles to which we need to return are those not of the Deists and Freemasons whom we call the Founding Fathers, but those of the Church Fathers.