There seems to be no end to the novel issues confronting our thoroughly modern military: "Military Moms Breastfeeding in Uniform Stirs Controversy"
I found this sentence from the story particularly interesting: "The Army, for example, didn't even come up with a combat uniform for women until 2010, so accepting the idea of a uniformed soldier breastfeeding a baby may be especially jarring."
But that was then. No doubt now the Department of Defense has already commissioned a blue-ribbon panel with the task of developing a new combat uniform for breastfeeding women. As soon, that is, as it finishes its more immediate charge of designing a new uniform for cross-dressing men.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
"A Nation of Hamburger Flippers"
Some of you may recall that phrase from the 1988 presidential campaign. It was a punchline used by candidate Michael Dukakis and all Democrats as way to denigrate the kind of job creation experienced under the Reagan administration and likely to continue under a George H.W. Bush presidency. It made my blood boil.
Too many elites and virtually all liberals seem constitutionally incapable of praising simple "honest labor" if it's not also what they deem to be "meaningful". Other than as a reflection of their insufferable snobbishness, it's impossible to know what they mean by the modifier. I don't know about you, but if it puts food on the table and pays the rent, it seems pretty meaningful to me.
Anyway, Thomas Sowell thinks similarly and as always we can turn to him for some common-sense thoughts on the subject.
Too many elites and virtually all liberals seem constitutionally incapable of praising simple "honest labor" if it's not also what they deem to be "meaningful". Other than as a reflection of their insufferable snobbishness, it's impossible to know what they mean by the modifier. I don't know about you, but if it puts food on the table and pays the rent, it seems pretty meaningful to me.
Anyway, Thomas Sowell thinks similarly and as always we can turn to him for some common-sense thoughts on the subject.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Memory Serves
Amy and Leon Kass posted this Memorial Day reflection a year ago and while they certainly encourage pausing to remember the sacrifices of fellow Americans who "gave the last full measure of devotion," they actually diagnose and prescribe something even more important than that for the health of our nation.
American identity, character, and civic life are shaped by many things, but decisive among them are our national memories—of our long history, our triumphs and tragedies, our national aspirations and achievements. Crucial to the national memory are the words our forebears wrote, to show us who we are and what we might yet become. Robust citizenship is impossible without national attachment. National attachment is thin at best without national memory. And national memory depends on story, speech, and song. (my italics)
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Sobering Sunday
What's that old Kristofferson song? Sunday Morning Coming Down
It's appropriate to a Memorial Day weekend of course, but for some deeper reason I suspect, I found myself thinking specifically about two men with whom I had served in the Air Force, both of whom gave their lives in the course of performing their duty. It's already long ago, or seems that way. That lead me to thinking about several other old comrades who were gone as well.
I thank God for them...for them all.
It's appropriate to a Memorial Day weekend of course, but for some deeper reason I suspect, I found myself thinking specifically about two men with whom I had served in the Air Force, both of whom gave their lives in the course of performing their duty. It's already long ago, or seems that way. That lead me to thinking about several other old comrades who were gone as well.
I thank God for them...for them all.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Shut Up and March!
That the Democrat Party is a hodgepodge collection of sometime conflicting interest groups is as true today as it was when Will Rogers famously quipped, "I am not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat."
But last week Cory Booker, Newark's popular-in-his-own-right Democrat mayor, publicly expressed disappointment with the direction of the Obama Campaign. Very soon thereafter, he defensively and querulously retracted that expression of dissatisfaction, and even launched a somewhat angry counter-attack against the Romney Campaign for making use of his earlier statements.
The episode reminded me, again, that however disorganized the Democrats may be, their exercise of party discipline is, well, admirable. The GOP could learn a thing or two from them.
But last week Cory Booker, Newark's popular-in-his-own-right Democrat mayor, publicly expressed disappointment with the direction of the Obama Campaign. Very soon thereafter, he defensively and querulously retracted that expression of dissatisfaction, and even launched a somewhat angry counter-attack against the Romney Campaign for making use of his earlier statements.
The episode reminded me, again, that however disorganized the Democrats may be, their exercise of party discipline is, well, admirable. The GOP could learn a thing or two from them.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Whose Community?
"Community" is one of those words and ideas contemporary liberals often use to pummel conservatives. As in, we humane progressives/liberals are for instilling and encouraging a sense of community, while you selfish and heartless conservatives are against it.
Reliably silly Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., has thrown the latest punch charging conservatives with an anti-communitarianism of relatively recent vinage, an un-American, a-historical embrace of the rugged, asocial, alienated actually, self-reliant but self-absorbed individual over against the more stable and emotionally healthy citizen who recognizes the debt he owes his alma mater, his "nurturing mother", not his real mom mind you, but the society that spawned him and within which he was reared. Think Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
Good grief. There is so much wrong with Dionne's piece, not to mention his thinking, that it's hard to know where to begin. How about these three quick counter-punches?
First, as Dionne's brand of community always involves more government spending, the easiest response is to say simply, "Hey E.J., haven't you heard, WE'RE BROKE!"
Second, confused but still ultimately secular liberals like Dionne apparently can only imagine community in material terms, where, a la Marx and Engels, "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things." Whether it's infrastructure, socialized medicine, entitlements, whatever, for them it's always and only a government program redistributing wealth that can effectively create community where it's absent, or demonstrate its health where it's present. There is apparently no vertiginous anomie the isolated and alienated individual suffers that it can't be successfully mollified if not cured with a large enough welfare check. This is so ridiculous it serves as its own rebuttal. (Oh, and by the way E.J., a Civil War veteran's pension is not the same thing as a contemporary entitlement, but rather of payment or reward for services rendered.)
Third, the idea of "community" is actually being used in two very different ways by liberals and conservatives. For liberals, and this is where they really are in a sense classical liberals, society or community is not something that occurs naturally, or at least it does not occur very well naturally. Left alone, individuals remain, well, individual. Whatever communities they do manage to form are purely instrumental and short-lived, satisfying or attaining some immediate need or goal (securing rights perhaps?, but I digress), but always at the expense of other individuals or other communities. As their loyalties are ultimately to themselves alone, the communities thus created are, paradoxically, hostile to community. Hence, the liberal need to supply what nature lacks, that is, to create, nay, to manufacture community, top-down, homogenized, one-size-fits-all, Esperanto-speaking community. Such a community would presumably provide everything... but liberty.
When conservatives use the word "community", we think instead of something that occurs, although not perfectly, quite naturally nonetheless, a product of family ties and extended family ties, of blood and of marriage that produces new blood, of a common language, of a common faith, of a common culture, of propinquity (look it up), of the shared search for solutions to common problems that arise because of propinquity, etc. The succor afforded, the advice offered, the restraints required, yes, restraints, to my liberty by such a community is effectual because it is provided by family and friends, men and women I am more likely to know and therefore trust and not by some nameless bureaucrat from far-away Washington who I most assuredly do not know and therefore will not trust.
Finally, the distinction is this: conservatives have faith in a "community" formed of free individuals, liberals do not. Conservatives are sometimes dismissed by liberals/progressives as simplistic libertarians because we share with them a similar commitment to liberty. The difference is that we conservatives embrace liberty in large measure because it is only at the most basic level of the free individual that genuine community abides and abounds, providing what Dionne thinks he's providing when he isn't justifying yet another big-government program..
To be fair, this is really a very BIG issue and warrants a much bigger response, but the bell just sounded and I need to rest up for the next round.
Reliably silly Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., has thrown the latest punch charging conservatives with an anti-communitarianism of relatively recent vinage, an un-American, a-historical embrace of the rugged, asocial, alienated actually, self-reliant but self-absorbed individual over against the more stable and emotionally healthy citizen who recognizes the debt he owes his alma mater, his "nurturing mother", not his real mom mind you, but the society that spawned him and within which he was reared. Think Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
Good grief. There is so much wrong with Dionne's piece, not to mention his thinking, that it's hard to know where to begin. How about these three quick counter-punches?
First, as Dionne's brand of community always involves more government spending, the easiest response is to say simply, "Hey E.J., haven't you heard, WE'RE BROKE!"
Second, confused but still ultimately secular liberals like Dionne apparently can only imagine community in material terms, where, a la Marx and Engels, "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things." Whether it's infrastructure, socialized medicine, entitlements, whatever, for them it's always and only a government program redistributing wealth that can effectively create community where it's absent, or demonstrate its health where it's present. There is apparently no vertiginous anomie the isolated and alienated individual suffers that it can't be successfully mollified if not cured with a large enough welfare check. This is so ridiculous it serves as its own rebuttal. (Oh, and by the way E.J., a Civil War veteran's pension is not the same thing as a contemporary entitlement, but rather of payment or reward for services rendered.)
Third, the idea of "community" is actually being used in two very different ways by liberals and conservatives. For liberals, and this is where they really are in a sense classical liberals, society or community is not something that occurs naturally, or at least it does not occur very well naturally. Left alone, individuals remain, well, individual. Whatever communities they do manage to form are purely instrumental and short-lived, satisfying or attaining some immediate need or goal (securing rights perhaps?, but I digress), but always at the expense of other individuals or other communities. As their loyalties are ultimately to themselves alone, the communities thus created are, paradoxically, hostile to community. Hence, the liberal need to supply what nature lacks, that is, to create, nay, to manufacture community, top-down, homogenized, one-size-fits-all, Esperanto-speaking community. Such a community would presumably provide everything... but liberty.
When conservatives use the word "community", we think instead of something that occurs, although not perfectly, quite naturally nonetheless, a product of family ties and extended family ties, of blood and of marriage that produces new blood, of a common language, of a common faith, of a common culture, of propinquity (look it up), of the shared search for solutions to common problems that arise because of propinquity, etc. The succor afforded, the advice offered, the restraints required, yes, restraints, to my liberty by such a community is effectual because it is provided by family and friends, men and women I am more likely to know and therefore trust and not by some nameless bureaucrat from far-away Washington who I most assuredly do not know and therefore will not trust.
Finally, the distinction is this: conservatives have faith in a "community" formed of free individuals, liberals do not. Conservatives are sometimes dismissed by liberals/progressives as simplistic libertarians because we share with them a similar commitment to liberty. The difference is that we conservatives embrace liberty in large measure because it is only at the most basic level of the free individual that genuine community abides and abounds, providing what Dionne thinks he's providing when he isn't justifying yet another big-government program..
To be fair, this is really a very BIG issue and warrants a much bigger response, but the bell just sounded and I need to rest up for the next round.
Mak'em Laugh
Boy did this piece come as a relief. It's by F.H. Buckley, a professor at the George Mason University School of Law and here I was thinking that lawyers couldn't have a sense of humor. Caustic bite? You bet. But humor? Well, in this article it's both and it's long overdue. Enjoy.
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