I have written about my father on previous occasions in this BLOG but, with this being Father’s Day weekend, and with my dear old man heading toward 81, I am not so sure which special day will be his last. With that in mind, I feel compelled to again write about how much one person can mean to another’s life. We hear the tragedies of bad parenting all the time. In truth, it is so common that it has become popular as a defense strategy for felons committing all varieties of heinous crimes as adults to blame their parents - more often than not, their fathers - absent or present - for their psychopathology. Dads get plenty of bad press. So, to change the focus - if ever so slightly - I want to give my father (and the millions just like him) - fathers of we "baby boomers" his due. << MORE >>

Since I am no conspiracy theorist by nature, it takes a leap of faith for me to start seeing plots in banal statistics but I can’t help but make the following jump. To whit: 1. On average, children and adolescents spend more than 6 hours a day with media (television, internet, computer gaming, et cetera). Two-thirds of our youth have a television set in their bedrooms, half have a VCR or DVD player, half have a video game console and one-third have access to the internet. (1) 2. There is increasing evidence that the frontal cortical function of this age group is being inhibited and possibly permanently damaged in the brains of our young. Only the second statement can be questioned; the first is based on universally-accepted and verifiable statistics. It is my hypothesis that the first statement of fact directly impacts and is perhaps the primary cause of the hypothetical second statement. Please allow me to elaborate. << MORE >>

From WikiPedia: "According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens. They had become weak, outsourcing their duties to defend their Empire to barbarian mercenaries, who then became so numerous and ingrained that they were able to take over the Empire. Romans, he believed, had become effeminate, unwilling to live a tougher, "manly" military lifestyle. He further blames the degeneracy of the Roman army and the Praetorian guards."<< MORE >>

To observe that what was once the Republican Party is in tatters should come as no surprise to anyone with half a brain and a modicum of awareness (coincidently, both qualities seem distinctly absent in the "leaders" of said political party). When the your political platform is roundly dismissed by the majority of voters at all levels - city, state and national - in favor of your opposition’s ideology, it is time for a in-depth revision of that platform. It has happened before with great success for both the Democrats and Republicans and, if ever there was a time for the Grand Old Party to huddle for a group rethink, this is the time. I say this not because a long-time Republican Senator has summarily "jumped ship" or because a thoroughly annoying, quasi-comedian has managed to win election to the Senate from Minnesota (after all, the Gopher State did once elect Jesse "The Body" Ventura, feather boa and all, as its governor) or that some Republicans people actually still consider the current governor of Alaska as a viable candidate for President in 2012. I am lately arrived at this opinion because, for the first time in my lifetime, the party of my youth has little more than a gaggle of quacking, annoying talking heads, each saying much but signifying nothing as their figureheads. Not actual office holders, mind you, but (cough, cough) "television personalities". Think Paris Hilton outlining national political policy and you can get a good idea of the direction things are headed. << MORE >>

The bigger question and, after all, the subject of this rant is this: Why in the name of all that is decent and good did I even give one nanosecond’s thought to the opinion of someone who (a) I am not even friends with, (b) is no fashion-plate himself (unless you count "redneck sheik" as fashion) and (c) doesn’t pay my rent, buy my groceries or contribute 1/1000th of my monthly income? I’ll answer my own question: Because human beings have a predisposition to conformity. And, when that desire to be indistinguishable from the Great Mob is challenged - obviously, by anyone - we get uncomfortable.<< MORE >>

The paleoliberal believes there is much in the wisdom of the species and the prevailing triumvirate of Burke’s "prejudices, prescription and presumptions". He believed, as the modern paleoliberal believes, that there is little to be discovered of the nature of man nor in the science of government. Prudent change can renew the body politic but only when undertaken with care, trepidation and caution. Great leaps forward should not be sought or hoped for as the mind of man can invent little that the wisdom of the species has not already considered and cast aside. In contemporary America, when government has usurped the power of the self-correcting "invisible hand" of capitalism and has begun to work its own man-made mischief, it would be wise for all to mark the results. Ancient institutions of finance, free enterprise and self-interest quake at the prospects. And the sinister specter of socialism asks: "What think ye of me?" For when Leviathan steps from its Fortress on the Potomac and walks among the mob, we are all in peril. << MORE >>

The point to be made is that only in the human species can such evil exist. History has proven this, over and again, throughout it’s annals. Caligula and Nero of Rome were but heralds of the evil that men can do. Giles de Rais, one of the richest men in France, killed and raped over 100 young girls and boys in the 15th Century. Countess Elizabeth Bathory murdered nearly 600 girls in Hungary during the early 17th Century. And, three centuries later, Hitler rose to the heights of atrocity. But, these are only the colossi of the inglorious pantheon of evil men. The hallways are filled with the busts of less famous - but hardly less evil - men (and women) that have marked mankind as not merely the keepers of the flame of evil amidst nature but give silent witness to the cruel fact that evil is always among us. The list (and there actually is one) of evil proves that no geographic boundaries exist for the perpetration of evil deeds. << MORE >>

Let us take leave, but only temporarily, from the ongoing series on paleoliberalism as espoused by Russell Kirk, to address a related (if only tangentially) topic. Since I only just read the book (clearly, as it was published a quarter-century ago, I am irreparably behind on my "to do" list), I am exceedingly late to this particular party. But Neil Postman’s "Amusing Ourselves to Death", a critique of modern culture that is both timeless and exquisitely relative to our 3rd Millennium society, is worth waiting for. It is rare for me (being as oddly archaic and anachronistic as I am) to find a book that so clearly elucidates every thought I have had about the state of American society that I was compelled, at regular intervals during its reading, to stand up and shout: "Right on, brother!" [See? I told you I am an anachronism!). Amusing Ourselves to Death is such a tome. In my own clumsy way, certainly less entertaining than Postman, I had already addressed the main thesis of the book in this BLOG (See "Lowering the Bar"). So, the book and the comments that follow on it fit very well into my personal "world view" and, I suspect, likewise into that of many of my readers. This, I assume because, res ipso loquitur, they still actually read. << MORE >>

Those who would equilibrate man, as a carpenter at his level, does the spirit of man no service. For, through his machinations, he seeks only to assuage his own misplaced sense of guilt in the name of lifting up all humankind to whatever artificial economic and social strata he has concocted. Not so ironically, it is typically those who have amassed financial excesses in their own lives that cry so arduously for uplift. This is singularly true of those who have achieved their fortune through caprice or blind luck - e.g. the Hollywood gliterrati whose only claims to talent is a fetching face or comely shape, the quick-rich digital mavens of the computer industry and the celebrities of the music (using the term in its loosest sense) industry. These lucky few (steeped in incurable romanticism and irreparably disconnected from the realities of the world) use their fame to speak out against the economic stratification of society. It is telling that few (if any) offer up their own fortunes to directly ameliorate the plight of the "have nots" and prefer to have the citizen on the street (those, in fact, who work for their daily bread) do the heavy financial lifting. These hypocrites know little to nothing of life in the streets and industries of America but take it as their life-purpose (since they have little else to fill that enormous black hole, save their vanity) to mend the plight of all "who have so little". The multimillionaires see nothing disjointed about an unmarried, unemployed woman having 14 children through the implanting of fertilized ovum into her prodigious uterus; the average working American finds very much wrong with the concept. << MORE >>

In the first issue of this series, I set the ground rules of the discourse. That is to say, I would, as a point of reference, use one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the last 100 years or so, Dr. Russell Kirk, and his classic The Politics of Prudence. I would specifically concentrate my premises on his ten core principles of the conservative mind. I assert that, in these hard, challenging times of our Republic, they offer the best and brightest hope of comfort, confidence and wisdom in dealing with the situation in which we find ourselves. As opposed to the despair that falls on us from the City on the Potomac (as far as any metropolis can be from Governor Winthrop’s "Shining City on a Hill") and from the mouths and pens of its minions, the mass media, all is not lost. There are problems, to be sure, but, rather than confine and imprison our minds to the worry and despair dispensed from the apothecaries of government, we should harken back to the principles of our Forefathers. And, yes, even farther back in time to antiquity. For the wisdom of man is sparse and, for those who do not regularly retreat to the dog-eared pages of the ancient sages, prone to sorcery and chicanery. The wisdom of the species - i.e. the hard won lessons from 2500 years of human history- is, indeed, wise. The fog of modern times cannot obscure the path to greatness when one keeps a clear, disciplined view of the past. And the paleoliberal mind (a.k.a. the classical conservative) knows this truism all too well.<< MORE >>