Uncommon Commentary #122

Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod (who deserved to be ousted not for alleged racism but for her left-wing political actions) is indignant not at those who unfairly discharged her but at Andrew Breitbart, who made that infamous video—evidently sent to him by someone else, who had edited it—available online; she has accused him of being "willing to destroy me ... in order to try to destroy the NAACP."  How does she know that he was "willing to destroy" her?  Breitbart has said that "this is not about Shirley Sherrod" and that (to quote a Fox News story) he "posted the clip to show that racism exists at the NAACP, since members in the audience laughed as she told the story"; this explanation is quite credible. (Even the person who sent Breitbart the video clip is not necessarily guilty of malice; if he sought to make the same point about the NAACP that Breitbart did, he would not have needed to exhibit the whole video—if that would even be feasible—but only the part in which the NAACP members demonstrated amusement at Sherrod's relating of how she denied the White farmer as much help as she could have given him.)  Sherrod is treating Breitbart precisely as the Obombast Administration treated her in sacrificing her without hearing her side of the story.

Uncommon Commentary #121

I don't know how the story got started that it's nearly impossible to subdue Afghanistan.  The Afghans have actually been defeated by just about everyone who conquered in that part of the world: Persians, Greeks and Macedonians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, British—multiple times by some of these.

Uncommon Commentary #120: Slick Words for a Sick Byrd

In his eulogy of Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, Bill Clinton said that "He once had a fleeting association with [the] Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?  I [sic] tell you what it means.  He was a country boy from [the] hills and hollows of West Virginia.  He was trying to get elected.  And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done and he spent the rest of his life making it up."  Presumably this Rhodes scholar meant not "making it up" but "making up for it," but let me begin my assessment of the Failed President's funeral oration. (I refer to the words of Clinton; our current Failed President also said something ridiculously disingenuous about Byrd, replete with cloying pseudo-patriotism, but his remarks are outside the scope of this uncommon commentary.)

1.            What Clinton calls a "fleeting association" with the KKK began in the early 1940's, when Byrd founded a chapter of that organization by recruiting 150 new members, who (unanimously) made him their "Exalted Cyclops" or leader of said chapter; the title seems accidentally appropriate for so monstrous a man who became so powerful a member of the US Senate.  Byrd would later say that he ended his membership "after about a year," but as late as 1946 or 1947 he wrote to a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan that "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state [sic] in the nation [sic]."

2.            What does Dirty Byrd's having been a country boy, and his "trying to get elected," have to do with his having been a Klansman?  Was Clinton slandering rural West Virginians, by saying that Byrd's environs made him a bigot? Or that racism was so pervasive in the people's hearts and in public debate that he had to pretend to be one in order to get their votes?  There's something wrong with this alibi, anyway: When Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan, he was under 25 years of age, and thus wasn't even old enough to stand for public office.  Indeed, Byrd said that he never considered a future in politics until a KKK official told him that he had a talent for leadership, and that this happened at age 23 or 24, hence, in 1940 or 1941.  Furthermore, in 1952, when he began his career of corruption by campaigning successfully for a seat in the US House of Representatives, he told the electorate that his participation in the KKK was a thing of the past.

3.            What did Clinton mean, "maybe" (Byrd "did something he shouldn't have done")?

4.            How did Byrd make up for the wrong that he had done: by becoming the congressional "King of Pork?"

It seems to me that it wasn't Byrd but Clinton who was "making it up," that is to say, fabricating offensive nonsense to disguise the reality of the late Senator's failed life.

Uncommon Commentary #119

Emperor Nerobama really is unbelievable.  Now, we learn from NASA Administrator Bolden, in statements confirmed by the Oval Office, that his boss wants the agency to do three things: "re-inspire children to want to get into science and math," "expand our international [sic] relationships," and "engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good [sic] about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."  Doesn't "explore space" belong on this list?  Planetary scientist and former astronaut Tom Jones has written of the NASA:

Its shuttle program will end early next year, and the space agency has no clear, approved plan to build the shuttle’s successor….  Due to inattention and lack of funding by our policy-makers, American [sic] astronauts next year will be forced to reach the Station via Russian rockets, at least through 2015….  Once the shuttle retires, [the] NASA doesn’t know when U.S. rockets will again launch astronauts from Cape Canaveral, or whether those rockets will be privately run, or government-owned, like the shuttle….  Even less certain are the means for [the] NASA to reach deep space, … and when American [sic] explorers might be ready for such a journey.

As you know if you read The Heavens That Interest Me Number Only Seven, I consider penetration of the cosmos to be largely a waste; if we're even going to have a NASA, though, it ought to serve the purpose for which it was originally intended.

Uncommon Commentary #118

I wonder whether Christopher Hitchens, author of an infamous atheist book, realizes that his first name is religious (meaning "messiah-bearer").

Uncommon Commentary #117: Taking Exception to Exceptionalism

Although I consider myself a Domanist rather than a "conservative," I do align with nearly all positions that are considered "conservative"; I must, however, totally reject "American [sic] exceptionalism," which phrase I had never heard until quite recently, and which I would like to never hear again.

I've never heard or seen this concept defined, but the idea seems to be that (the United States of) "America" is radically different from every other country in the world.  Culturally, the USA is one of the most unexceptional places on Earth, being almost undistinguishable from its northern neighbor. (In fact, Canucks generally view themselves and Yanks as fellow North Americans—one might perhaps designate them together by my coinage, "Yankanucks"—and regard the US-Canadian border, which people have crossed in both directions for generations, as an inconvenience.)  An indignant patriot, if forgetful of the fact that we have jettisoned our own "melting pot" ideology in favor of its antithesis, "diversity is our strength," might retort that our status as a "nation of immigrants" sets us apart from others.  In reality, other New World destinations, especially Canada, have shared in the waves of immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere, and even Old World countries like Great Britain often have more ethnic heterogeneity than people on this side of the Atlantic Ocean realize.  It should be noted further that some things thought of by us as quintessentially "American" really are of foreign origin; for instance, the cowboy hat was developed in Canada, and baseball is basically the same as "rounders," a game played by British children.  In centuries long past we might have evolved into a unique civilization, but, because of such forces of globalization as mass media and international commerce, the peoples of the world are growing closer together rather than farther apart.

Attendance at houses of worship reportedly is higher in the USA than in almost any other heavily industrialized land, but, if one were to ignore that statistic and base one's assessment of our piety on statistics related to moral issues, one would have no reason to conclude that religious belief is more characteristic of our country than of the nations of Europe, with which we are always being contrasted.  At the beginning of the 1990's, for instance, 420 abortions were induced every day in the United Kingdom; in the USA, at the same time, the number was 4400.  Adjusting for the fact that the US had some 4½ times the population of the UK, an unborn child was well over twice as likely to be murdered here in the USA as in that supposedly more secular European state.  Even worse, churchgoers reportedly are no less likely than anyone else to become foeticides. (This doesn't necessarily mean that we are in more moral jeopardy than is the average Western polity.  We're all in the same boat, and it's going down; whether the bow, i.e., the Americas, or the stern, i.e., Europe, sinks first is of little consequence.)  The one distinction between us and Europeans in this category, therefore, apparently is that we are hypocrites; Europeans at least admit that they are no longer religious, whereas we Yanks say "Lord, Lord" but don't do as He tells us.

Yanks have a reputation (at least in some circles) for favoring smaller, less-paternal government than do Europeans, Canadians, &c., but this is not quite deserved.  First of all, this distinction, cosmetic as it may be anyway (see below), dates only to the period just after World War II, when many nations imitated the reforms made by the National Socialists ("Nazis") in Germany; in fact, during the 1930's, because of the great expansion of Uncle Sam's rôle that occurred under President F. D. Roosevelt, we were actually more socialistic than countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom, the latter of which had, since the mid-Nineteenth Century, been the world's leading advocate and practitioner of free trade, quite unlike the USA.  Second, even before Obama ascended the throne, the US government was far larger and more overweening than perhaps the typical person knew; the combination of State and federal taxes already put a greater burden on businesses in our economy than in any other save that of Japan, and per-capita government spending was higher (even after accounting for price differences) here than anywhere else except Luxembourg, Qatar, Norway, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France.  Indeed, the ostensibly communist People's Republic of China is more truly capitalist and laissez-faire than the USA these days.  Third, opposition to a planned economy and so forth is far from universal in Yankeedom, and this has been the case for as long as Jeffersonians have liked to think of us as the champion of free markets.

Perhaps at least some of the "exceptionalists" are stuck in the past (which, admittedly, is a better place to be stuck than the present, now that we've become the Obama Nation).  Having been founded on a political instead of an ethnic basis, the USA had a stronger claim to singularity when it was new—but what about Switzerland and the Austrian empire?

Our civilization is not exceptional even in deeming itself exceptional, assuming that this is even majority sentiment.  The classical Greeks, for example, felt the same way, but they, as the devisors of logic, philosophy, science, and theatre, had far better cause than we do for thinking thus. (And the opinion was not limited to themselves; it used to be thought that the ancient Greeks must have been a unique race, so much greater were their accomplishments than those of any other people.)  The Jews of Old Testament times vaunted themselves as a chosen people in a promised land, but, according to the Word of God, they were.

Naturally, the content of the preceding paragraphs doesn't prove that the USA is identical to any other state, even to Canada.  This is probably the one country (at least so far) to which people believe they have some sort of God-given right to emigrate, legally or otherwise—but don't you think that when "America" is pronounced "exceptional," this is meant in a good way?  The truth is that self-congratulation, whether the self is an individual or a personification like Uncle Sam, is to be avoided.  The New Testament and the Church Fathers tell us that we are only sojourners in this world, and that our true home—our true country—lies in Heaven; Heaven may be a difficult place to come home to, if one has dwelt chauvinistically on how special one considers one's homeland to be.

Uncommon Commentary #116: To Heck with Hel-en

In an Eddie Cantor film, there was a gag about a Yank telling an American Indian: "If you don't like this country, go back where you came from."  I bring up this joke in order to illustrate how "journalist" Helen Thomas's remark that the Israelis (who, as the Israelites, already occupied the Holy Land in the Second Millennium BC) should "go back home, to Poland or Germany," in addition to being hateful, was also strikingly stupid.