2012: A "Happy" New Year, or The Same As It Ever Was?

I was mulling over a few ideas for either an end-of-year "Auld Lang Syne" post or a "Happy New Year" one when I fell upon these three pieces appearing in NRO at the same time

First, for some wry commentary about the "phoniness" of 2011, enjoy Jonah Goldberg's recollections here:  "2011: You Can't Win for Losing".

Next, for dry witticisms about our penchant for denying the same, try Mark Steyn's "Happy New Year?"

Flowing from the pens of Goldberg and Steyn, both pieces are reliably amusing. But in this instance, they're a bit depressing as well.

So, finally, for an important call to action of sorts, turn then to Charles Krauthammer's "Are We Alone in the Universe?" 

At the end of an otherwise sobering article, Krauthammer digresses with this:

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts. 

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction. 

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. 

Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

You're probably familiar with the old adage, usually attributed to Edmund Burke, that "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."  I have a theory that the good men of America, the best men, are only very rarely motivated to become actively engaged in politics.  When our society is functioning properly, that is, when it's operating according to the original plan, the stuff that makes for day-to-day politics is for the most part minimized and marginalized.  During such times, good men and women are preoccupied with minding their own business, i.e., making a buck, inventing a better mouse trap, raising a family, volunteering to coach Little League or lead a Girl Scout Troop, etc.  It's only when confronted with genuine crises that such people are roused to action.  Regrettably, we now live in a time of genuine crises and all that is necessary for evil to triumph is, well, you know the rest.

Therefore, good men and women of America, if you're not already politically involved, in 2012 resolve to become so.  At the very least, resolve to encourage, to press even, the good men and women whom you know to become so.  The normally "silent majority" of good Americans has not yet been heard.  When they finally are, I remain confident that things will change...and for the better.

Happy New Year everyone!  

Cracking Up

Health authorities in Vancouver, British Columbia have introduced the distribution of free (i.e., tax payer funded) crack cocaine pipes in their determination to improve their city's public health.  This latest health-care initiative, a product of the most advanced progressive thought, joins ongoing efforts that already include the distribution of "free" hypodermic syringes and "free" condoms in cities across both Canada and the US.

Above and Beyond

Or should that be aloof and remote?  The New York Time's Helene Cooper profiles President Obama's apparent distaste for the "glad-handing, ego-stroking" aspects of the political art and while her piece is clearly sympathetic, she does point out the potential costs to a politician who eschews politics.

I argue about this often with my wife and with many friends as well, but I actually think I could like Barack Obama personally, the un-Bill Clinton, if it weren't for his unalloyed Leftism.  At the risk of indicting myself for the same crime, Obama doesn't like playing politics for the same reason I don't:  He knows he's right and he knows you're wrong.

As it happens, my positions are consistent with the Founding, with maximal liberty, with keeping alive the distinction between the personal and the political, and are buttressed by a mountain of empirical evidence about delivering the goods the Left can never, ever, hope to match.  His positions are the exact opposite in each particular and as for supporting evidence, well, there's little to none. 

Charge each of us with arrogance if you like, but who would you rather trust? The guy who wants your liberty along with your property or the guy who doesn't?  

Giving Thanks for the Incarnation

My last post was a little heavy for the Christmas season.  Probably should have saved it for the New Year, an encouragement to a resolution of sorts.

Anyway, like many of you I'm on my way home just now, full of anticipation over the repatriation of my children, eager to enjoy their company along with that of my larger family in the days to follow.  I am truly blessed and truly thankful for it.

So blessed and thankful and eager for it in fact, that I fear this Christmas Day may pass as so many others have without my considering seriously, as they say, the reason for the season, the Incarnation of the Holy One.

I don't know abou you, but as a Christian, I've always thought the doctrine of the Trinity, as difficult as it is to grasp, intellectual child's play when compared to that of the Incarnation.  That the Messiah, the Christ, the long-awaited Savior could be, as the church testifies, fully man and fully God, is beyond comprehension.  In fact, if you are not a believer, I suspect it smacks of certifiable nonsense.

But if you are a believer, it not so much makes sense as it is received, like a gift, like the very gift it is described as in the scriptures:  "For God so loved the world, that he gave..."

If we can never unwrap the mystery of the Incarnation, may we at least unwrap anew the gift that it is this Christmas morning and for it pause to praise the God from Whom all blessings flow.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Vicarious Victimhood

Robert Zaretsky, a professor of history, has forsworn his former role as a "Holocaust expert" and in this piece he explains why.  He writes that, as a Jew, it appealed to his sense of  "self-dramatization":

It appealed to me for all sorts of awful reasons. First of all, it satisfied my desire as an acculturated and agnostic Jew for identification with the religion of my ancestors. In his intellectual memoir, The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkielkraut, born after World War II and ignorant of anti-Semitism, described how he happily shouldered the Holocaust as a cheap yet effective form of self-identity in France, one that carried all of the metaphysical weight with none of the historical experience. Finkielkraut wrote that, thanks to the all too real tragedy of the war, he eagerly assumes the heroic leading role in his own make-believe tragedy. “The interminable list of all of these deaths,” he noted, “was my passport to nobility.”

Vicarious victimhood as a "passport to nobility."

I'm afraid this describes far too accurately much of Western culture for the past 50 years or so.  Oh to be a person of color, any color, to be a woman, to be disabled, to be a Jew, to be successfully associated with any identifiable minority.

And before you think me a bigot, please note that able-bodied white males are not free from this temptation.  My father used to joke about how every big-time country singer would wax about being reared in a log cabin, now a trailer.  Or consider for a moment how many of our politicians strive to strike an up-from-something, up-from-anything pose even if they actually come from, and obviously so, privilege.

What does it get you?  Well, in the first instance, it's an effective shield against serious criticism of any kind.  But it's also a weapon, a trump card one can play in order to win whatever is at stake in any game one is playing.  Or worse, it's a bludgeon one can wield to harm another unjustly.

Those aspects of vicarious victimhood are bad enough, but it's as a "passport to nobility" that it is most twisted.  Why?  Because it does not, because it cannot deliver.

If an under-nourished soul of nobility is present, it always ends where it ended for Professor Zaretsy:  "Dissolution", as he titles his piece.  But if such a soul is not present, it feeds instead many if not all of the pathologies that currently afflict our culture.  

No Mas! No Mas!

As the politics of the issue were increasingly on the Democrats' side, Speaker Boehner and the House Republicans, after a stubborn, what, one-week struggle, were finally forced to wave the white flag and agree to the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut previously agreed upon in the Senate and insisted upon by the Obama White House.  (Just in case you didn't catch it, that was sarcasm.)

At this point, the details of this issue matter not at all.  What matters is this:  Why pick a battle you don't intend to fight?  Not win necessarily, or probably, or even potentially, but just fight?

The issue is fast becoming the competence of the GOP congressional leadership...and it should.

"The poor you will have with you always"

Thus saith the Lord, and the American Left, in the name of eradicating it, ironically, wants to make damn sure it remains so forever.

And what, exactly, do we mean by "poor" in America today?  As has often been pointed out, obesity has come to be one of its surest signs.  So, to use in this country the word "poor", as in material poverty, is an insult to genuinely poor people across the globe.  Actually, the poor of whom the Left are referring are the politically poor, that is, those who have less than others and can therby be used for and to political purpose and advantage.

That purpose is of course to discredit the legacy of this great country, along with those who want to conserve that legacy, a legacy of liberty and opportunity.  Their lastest strategem toward this end is to highlight rising income inequality.  But, as the Washington Post's Charles Lane points out, their view of it is "simplistic."  He invokes the work of an otherwise obscure economist, Arthur Okun, who while sympathetic to their goal of eliminating poverty, also understood something about the effort they seem unable, or unwilling to grasp:

Okun saw free markets as a source of unparalleled human progress — and of big gaps between rich and poor. Indeed, he argued, markets are efficient partly because they distribute economic rewards unevenly. Government should try to smooth out income stratification, but such efforts risk undermining incentives to work and invest.  

Hence the “big trade-off”: channeling income from rich to poor, Okun wrote, was like trying to carry water in a leaky bucket. He wanted to move money from rich to poor without “leaking” so much economic growth that the whole process became self-defeating.

I, for one, don't think the Left's nor the Obama Administration's view is simplistic at all.  They know exactly what they are trying to do.  Radical equality is their Great White Whale and they do not care if, like Captain Ahab, they and the country along with them sinks in the mad pursuit.