The 5th Wheel

I was working out on the treadmill watching the television they show at “LA Fitness.” Much to my horror, I discovered the Fifth Wheel. For those living in caves reading Plato unaware of afternoon television, this program brings adults, many just eighteen, together to have sex. There is not even the excuse of dating and falling in love. Conversation is crude and displays no discernible literacy skills. These are losers, elevated for the moment to be exploited by the producers of the show. Two couples mix and match until they pair off, then a good looking fifth wheel is introduced to break things up. Morality is missing, utterly missing, from the lives of these badly educated and exploited young adults.

My life is full of regrets for stupid and wrong things I did as a young adult, some done in ignorance. Shame is real. Emotional hurt is also real. However, the good news is that my afternoon television, when I got home from school was not telling me that living like a barbarian was good. Society, one cannot use culture here, was not saying that value and love free sex were desirable.

Of course, in the age of AIDS and the herpes epidemic, there are other dangers that by the grace of God I did not face. Here is a show that takes young men and women that the culture deems too young to drink responsibly, who in fact cannot drink responsibly, and unleashes the far more powerful sexual impulse without any restraint. Are these young adults going to become fit parents?

Again, I am no prude. Few of us are perfect, but there is a difference between the stupidity of youth and rejoicing in it. There is a difference between putting down the stone, and I thank God for grace, and holding a party to celebrate sin. I am not judging the sinners, but the producers of this show who decided to encourage their sin. In our culture, most of us hope for a pass on the person we were when were in our early twenties, so I only fear sorrow for the participants of the show. However, for the producers and directors of this wicked little thing, there should only be disgust and scorn.

God save us.

Disneyland Resort

The Tower of Terror is here. Sigh. Where is Walt? This ride is detailed and expensive. It proves that Disneyland is not Magic Mountain and never will be. California Adventure is a disaster for a Disney park, but would be an improvement to any other park in the area. The sad state of Knotts Berry Farm is the best example. A once charming place has been turned into a nightmare of blacktop and rides thrown up in seconds with no concern for theming. Knotts Berry Farm is now ugly.

And that is the problem with the Tower. It is ugly. Go to the link and look at it. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion is lovely while being creepy (and fun!). The Tower is covered with stucco. It has an odd shape. . .it says nothing and draws no attention. Bluntly it is an eye sore to the sky line of Anaheim.

Tower of Terror is another example of the short sighted, cheap, and artistically bankrupt (sequel rides and sequel movies) Disney company. Will change come before real harm is done? Don’t bet on it. Once a business becomes about the management and not about the service provided, then the company is doomed.

Objections to These Unions: “There are only two objections to same-sex marriage that are intellectually honest and internally consistent. One is the simple anti-gay position: ‘It is the law’s job to stigmatize and disadvantage homosexuals, and the marriage ban is a means to that end.’ The other is the argument from tradition — which turns out, on inspection, not to be so simple. “

This is perhaps the most persuasive conservative argument for gay marriage making the rounds on the web, which tells you the argument for gay marriage is in trouble. First, one need not view it as the job of the law to “stigmatize and disadvantage” homosexuals to deny them marriage rights. The last I checked my unmarried friends did not feel that the law was making them second class citizens by not according them marriage rights. Not being given a privilege is not same as being told one is “bad.” Most of us have friendships that are not sexual that are deep, some as deep as marriage relationships. Biblical David did not have to have sex with Jonathan to love him. He also did not have to be married to his friend to feel that the culture was honoring him.

In the same way, male/male and female/female sexuality is not the sort of sex the government is in the business of encouraging. It has almost zero reproductive value, has no track record of stability, debases the currency of marriage by expanding it, and gives no one rights that could not be gained in other ways.

Homosexuality is a sad biological dead end which the state has no reason to encourage. It need not discourage it, but should not want to see more of it. Of course, we also know, through reason and revelation, that God hates homosexual behavior. He judges nations that encourage it. That is also a pretty good reason to avoid it. (Of course, God hates my own sinfulness. Heaven knows I have needed deep forgiveness for bad things I have done. Mercy is always there for the soul that would change. My desires can change, my will can become His. Two thousand years of religious knowledge argues that transformation of many kinds is possible!)

American politics will not be facing reality until previous support, or softeness toward, murderous communist regimes disqualifies from office.

The Soviet Union killed twenty-two million people. Men like Gorbachev still cannot bring themselves to denounce it. They are nice thugs, like Nazis with college educations and good art collections. (”Oh, I know Mr. Hitler is a bit wild, but, my dear, not all of us are so extreme.”)

No amount of good (trains running on time, more schools) justifies the great, horrid evil that was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union operated political camps to the day it died. It repressed religious liberty and economic freedom. It was bad.

Ronald Reagan thought the Soviet Union an evil empire. John Kerry could not bring himself to say such things. That makes John Kerry unfit for office.

John Derbyshire on Bigotry on National Review Online: “My colleague Ramesh Ponnuru picked up on that part of the president’s funeral eulogy to Ronald Reagan where he said: ‘He [i.e. Ronald Reagan] believed that bigotry and prejudice were the worst things a person could be guilty of.’ Noted Ramesh on The Corner: ‘I doubt that Reagan believed that proposition, and if he had, his holding of that view would not have been praiseworthy. I am sure, on the other hand, that Bush believes this proposition, or thinks that he does.’”

Some of the new writers at National Review fall into the sort of posturing that gives intellectuals of all sorts a bad name. Bill Buckley was smart and wrote as he thought. These two write as if trying to prove they are clever by words. To place a eulogy (for heaven’s sake!) under a microscope, toss in some historical references, and then withdraw from the entire self-created topic in disdain is pretentious twaddle. These are the sort of people who simply have to announce in the middle of one of the better action scenes during Troy (the movie) in an irritating movie house whisper, “Well of course bronze age weapons could not be made to do that!”

Freshmen in Torrey do this a good bit. They rush home and do critical examinations of saintly pastor’s sermons, men they are unfit to judge, using their new found tools of reason. This freshman disease has infected good National Review writers.

Let’s try to understand what Reagan and Bush might have meant.

What did Reagan (or even Bush mean)? Did Reagan mean that bigotry or prejudice were worse than stealing or rape? If he did, then was it foolish? Let’s assume Reagan meant what he said, had thought about it, and was right. (Always a good charitable procedure.) The statement looks so hopelessly wrong that it cannot be true. . . after all the camps in Nazi Germany seem a good bit worse than a snob at the local Dennys. Of course, the camps in Germany depended on bigotry to operate so that does not help the case of the NR freshmen.

It is likely that both Bush and Reagan meant something different by “worst” than “worst conceivable.” In context, calling bigotry the worst thing probably refers to the “worst thing ‘nice’ people are likely to be guilty of.” Most of us, thank God, will never face the chance to sin in the Big Ways used as examples by the National Review victims of freshman disease. However, we have frequent chances to demean, to be snobs, to be bigots. Bigotry, especially in regards to race, was the original sin of our great Republic and Americans have a moral obligation to root it out and despise it. If pride is the greatest sin, the sin of Satan, then bigotry (especially race bigotry) has been our very American form of it. This form is, of course, (as any simpleton would see) not the worst form in theory, but is often so in deed. The local member of a local charity, who could not imagine stealing a penny from an orphan, in private, make a demeaning remark about Jews. A life dedicated to helping people based on the image of God is mocked by acceptable bigotry. Nice people allow themselves this pride and so its destruction is all the worse.

Bigotry (soft or hard) denies the full image of God to another human. As such it is form of the worst sin that one can commit toward a brother. It is a form that in our culture is frequently tolerated (see college educated snobbery toward those not formally educated) and even praised in our culture. It has done great and lasting harm in the lifetimes of many still living. It was but sixty years ago when people were segregated, denied the right to vote, and treated like animals by science in inhumane experimentation. For a man Reagan’s age, this was current. For a man Bush’s age, it is still current enough to deserve public sorrow, like that rightly still expressed by Germans for the Holocaust.

So a sensible reading of what President Reagan said (in his letter) and what President Bush said in his eulogy of Reagan was: “In the recent past, acting out based on bigotry and prejudice were the worst things people of our class were allowed to do without guilt.”

Of course given the pretentious intellectual snobbery of the National Review writers, it is no wonder they dislike the President’s statement. However, it is a sensible thing to say, he said it, and I hope he meant it.

MSNBC - Altercation: ” Unless this administration is denied power on November 2, a collapse of historic proportions awaits us, far worse than what the Soviet Union went through. At least the Soviet Union had farsighted and courageous leaders like Gorbachev and Shevardnadze. What we have is a band of thugs who do not care one whit for our country or its people. Their only concern appears to be to preserve their power at all costs. I believe our humiliation as a nation will be complete if this gang is returned to power.”

The left has gone quite mad. George Bush has caused them to lose any sense of perspective.

And by the way: calling the last Leninists “farsighted and courageous” is why the Left cannot be trusted with our foreign policy. Gorbachev still believes Soviet communism was a good thing. Soviet Communism killed over twenty-million people. There are no good Soviets.

New America Foundation : article -1564- “Churchill for Dummies”: “Churchill for Dummies”

This article is a brilliant example of modern academic Jew-baiting. Note the coy reference to Strauss, one of the great thinkers of the last century, as a Jew. Note the paragraph on “foreign” leaders of the neo-conservatives.

This is wicked stuff.

The other great thing about Lind is his ability to write in the stiff and superior prose of the modern university system while still making sense. That is a real trick and while it makes him a horrid writer by any normal standards has given him a career writing for folk intimidated by intellectuals.

New America Foundation : article -1564- “Churchill for Dummies”: “Like his grand strategy, with its combination of unilateral American world domination with nearly indiscriminate support for Israel’s Ariel Sharon, the cult of Churchill has been adopted by Bush from American neoconservatives.”

What do they hate about Bush? It always comes back to Israel and Jews in the writings of his critics, right and left. The time has come for Orthodox persons to get rid of the language of moral equivalence and come down strongly in favor of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: How Reagan Beat the Neocons: “Mr. Reagan gave us an enlightened foreign policy that achieved most of its diplomatic objectives peacefully and succeeded in firmly uniting our allies. Today those who claim to be Mr. Reagan’s heirs give us ’shock and awe’ and a ‘muscular’ foreign policy that has lost its way and undermined valued friendships throughout the world.”

This facile New York Times piece (aren’t they all?) makes one big, evil, point: Reagan was a man of peace who stiffed neo-conservatives (read: Jews) and so won the Cold War. Neo-conservatives (Jews) would have made us fight and so lose it. The author glosses over the muscular Reagan assaults on the edges of the Evil Empire, but the New York Times is not drunk on the wine of history.

Vitally, the author must overlook the key fact that the War on Terror presents no government with which to negotiate. It also fails to account for the fact that the Soviets changed and Reagan recognized this fact, which is something lots of other people of all ideologies missed. However, if we accept his premise, then Bush should negotiate with the terrorists exactly at the moment when a “new leader” emerges who begins to undermine the system and who repudiates much of radical Islam. . . a sort of jihad Gorbie.

We wait this with eager anticipation.

A Widow’s Heartfelt Farewell (Nancy Reagan): “Honorary pallbearer Merv Griffin told friends that on the ride from the funeral home Monday to the Ronald Reagan Library in California, Mrs. Reagan told him she was moved and surprised by the public outpouring. Traffic in the opposite direction stopped, and people jumped from their cars to wave at the motorcade. ‘I thought they forgot Ronnie,’ she said, ‘because nobody had seen him for 10 years.’ “

Never, Mrs. Reagan. Old men may die and young men become old, but so long as the Republic endures we will remember. We know the old order must change, giving way to the new, lest even the best of men and legendary rulers be corrupted, but we will never forget that once from the West came a cowboy. Once there was a president who never dishonored his office and honored the men who served him. Once there was a kind and gentle man who ended an Evil Empire and set millions free. Wicked men are remembered for a time, but good men live forever. The American people will never forget Ronald Wilson Reagan.

So the old order changes, and gives way to the new, and good has come of it. George W. Bush holds the Old Man’s legacy untarnished and it is better so. But we will never forget the first and greatest of the President of many of our lifetimes and we will tell our children the story of his time and their children.

God speed, Mrs. Reagan.

The service for President Reagan was lovely. It was done with dignity and Vice President Cheney summed up the man’s life as well as it could be done.

Having said this, the service was almost ruined for me by the self-indulgent speech disguised as a prayer that opened the service. Trouble was telegraphed by the chest thrust out command of all Daniel P. Coughlin surveyed at the microphone. Daniel P. Coughlin had arrived and no one who heard him will ever think he had a thought for anyone but, well, Daniel P. Coughlin. For you see, Daniel P. Coughlin poured forth syrup from his speech-making mouth not heard on television since Mr. Brady gave advice to Greg.

Daniel P. Coughlin began “let us pray” and then forgot to pray, instead Daniel P. Coughlin began to dish up a mound of platitudes topped off by a bizarre use of T.S. Eliot. And then another reference to Daniel P. Coughlin’s reference to T.S. Eliot. And then another. The wheel may stop, but Daniel P. Coughlin’s prayer looked to go on forever.

As far as I could tell this puffery had nothing at all to do with Reagan, who was a Christian after all, and had everything to do with the pompous self-importance and main line non-religion of Daniel P. Coughlin. As he chased Daniel P. Coughlin’s ideas around while giving the Lord (who finally made it into Daniel P. Coughlin’s prayer) instructions on how to rule the universe, I was reminded why the Lord was ignored by the religous leaders of his day.

It is this kind of wind-baggery that gives ministers a bad name. Where is Franklin Graham when we need him?

Fire this lug. His job is do this very sort of thing, he is bad at it, and should go.

FOXNews.com - Top Stories - Court Affirms Ban on School Bible Classes: “Edgar ruled that the Bible Education Ministry program in Rhea County violated the First Amendment’s clause calling for separation of church and state (search). “

Smart boys and girls will look in vain for such a call in the First Amendment. Safe to say the founders of the state of Tennessee would not have joined if they had known Bible classes would be illegal.

In fact, in their Constitution they wrote this:

“Section 2. No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.”

Somehow this survived federal muster for decades. Secularists are taking over. . . let’s see if they can keep what we built from us.

Reagan took risks and won: “‘It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled. … The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena … who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.’ “

Every person tempted to small mindedness should read this quote from Teddy Roosevelt, think about the life of Reagan, and dare big things.

If you are in doubt about whether George W. Bush will be judged as a great president, go to the sites of his critics. (My favorite is Democratic Underground.) Examine what they are saying about Ronald W. Reagan. See the hate and the lies that they spew even at the hour of Reagan’s death. Then ask yourself: if they are that wrong about Reagan, what will history say about their views of Bush? Anyone who would vote for Reagan again should crawl over broken glass to vote for Bush.

Did Reagan win the Cold War? Yes.

When he started, the Soviets projected confidence and we looked to be in decline. When Reagan finished, the Soviets were finished. Was this luck? Was it an accident? Given that Reagan said that this is what would happen this seems improbable. If he was lucky, he was also a prophet. What he said would happen did happen.

Historical revisionists will discover macro-economic-political-demographic-blah-blah-blah that ended the Soviet Union. However, the same smart folk were saying that the Soviets would last forever and that opposing them was foolish before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When I was in graduate school, my professors believed Reagan was naive to think a system that killed twenty-two million people was evil. For all I know they still think it, but now the Soviet Union is gone and Russia is a better place.

John Kerry and the left were saying we were all doomed. We had to have a freeze on nuclear weapons. Reagan said the economy would boom with tax cuts. It did. He said we would win with “peace through strength.” We did.

Ronald Reagan was right. He won. Liberal academics have to deal with it.