Pat Robertson, the lightening rod televangelist and former presidential candidate, doesn’t much like Saturday Night Live mocking Tim Tebow, or Jesus Christ. He called last Saturday night’s skit part of wave of "anti-Christian bigotry that is just disgusting."
Is there a future in America for the more limited government that our Founding Fathers thought they were bequeathing to us? Something as trivial as a gold dollar coin can tell us something about that possibility, because you don't see a whole lot of those in circulation, despite the best efforts of politicians and government bureaucrats who think they are looking out for our good.
I bet you hadn’t heard anything about it. And it’s not exactly the anniversary of the cable, but when the cable made Network television possible coast to coast. If you’re a fan of TV at all, you’re going to want to read this wonderful piece by Terry Teachout about how profoundly things changed in that late summer of 1951, not only for the reach of a television signal, but also for programming.
Champions of liberty are usually harsh critics of the welfare state. Most have accepted the notion that some kind of social safety net is here to stay, but all agree the current level of spending and income redistribution is completely and disastrously unsustainable. With what’s happening in Europe, there are few except maybe the most diehard socialists who think things can continue as they are. If only we could tax the “rich” a little bit more . . . . Yet, countries could take every penny of every “rich” person and there still wouldn’t be enough money to sustain current and future transfer payments.
As I was driving around yesterday evening doing some errands with NPR on, as I am wont to do (please don’t hold it against me), a piece came on about songs that remind people of winter. Last summer NPR’s All Things Considered did a series on songs that remind people of summer and decided to do the same for winter. You know, the kind of songs that flood your mind with warm memories of another time. They pick a person, who may be well known or not, and ask them what their favorite winter song is.
We all know America is going to Hell in a hand basket, and the rest of the West is pretty much already so close to the flames that it’s started melting; or maybe not. Of course that depends on who you talk to. I can’t speak in detail about the entirety of Western civilization, but it’s clear that much of Europe and the English speaking world has rejected much of its cultural inheritance, with the deleterious results that follow. Is America following their possible demise, close behind?
We are coming up on another anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and another anniversary of highlighting the delusional paranoid expostulations of modern liberalism. The death of the young president was a seminal event not only for America and the world, but for Baby Boomer liberals. Post-war liberalism was on the ascendency. Kennedy was the fresh new face to take America beyond its racist benighted past to a 20th Century progressive liberal nirvana. All that hope was shattered on that November 22, 1963 day in Dallas, Texas.
You gotta love Woody Allen. Most atheists claim, and some vehemently, that finding meaning in a God-less universe is no big deal. Not so Woody Allen. His honesty about the matter is nothing if not refreshing.
We live in an age where the epistemological certainty of science is supposedly an unquestioned fact. To some the only way to true knowledge is through science and those things that are empirically verifiable. Anything else, like philosophy or religion is so much mumbo jumbo.
We are told by many of our cultural elites that “scientific consensus” is not to be questioned, whether this be about evolution or “climate change.” But consensus is a strange thing upon which to hang science’s definitive hat. By definition, science is theoretical; that which is supposedly true can at another time based on empirical observation be proven untrue, or at least open to question. Science is at best a tenuous thing on which to base a worldview.
It seems President Obama has decided to fully embrace his inner progressive-liberal populist, because his base thinks he hasn’t been sufficiently left-wing enough. When the president speaks to average Americans he pulls his punches, lest he appeal solely to the meager 20 percentwho self-identify as liberal. But when he’s out there appealing for money from his fellow Democrat bigwigs, the real Obama emerges.
This happens here and there and doesn’t get much play in the mainstream media, but the latest Obama reality check is priceless—it is a window into the soul of a true man of the left, a statist through and through. The president warns a sympathetic audience against the dangers of that most American of virtues: self-reliance.
Andrew Klavan is one of the most perceptive cultural analysts of our day, and his Klavan on Culture at Pajamas Media is a frequent stop of mine. In a recent post on a new book called Willpower, Klavan takes the Baby Boomer generation to task for ruining American culture. I suppose Boomers can be an easy target for such a charge, but Klavan does it in a way that shows how our liberties are lost at the door of license. Without personal responsibility, as the Founders of our country knew, true liberty is unattainable. Klavan understands and argues well that when we throw away moral values for a self-centered freedom to do whatever we want, we in fact get statist coercion running our lives. A great writer, he knows how to make his case: ehaving well, behaving responsibly, learning the norms of politeness and refusing to abandon them without good reason tend to make you a more self-controlled, successful, and finally better person. This is precisely the wisdom my generation threw away. Their promiscuity, adolescent foul-mouthedness, bad manners, and disregard for tradition — all of which they claimed were a new kind of freedom — were in fact the precursors
These are the titles of a couple books I read recently, and they go together perfectly. The subtitle of Ten Tortured Words is instructive: “How the Founding Fathers Tried to Protect Religion in America . . . and What’s Happened Since.” I can see the secular atheist types sharpening their metaphorical pens, but they have a minor problem: History. The distortion of the Founders intent regarding religion and state goes back to the 1947 Supreme Court’s majority decision in Everson v. Board of Education. But it wasn’t the opinion itself that offended the right ordering of the 158 years of history that came before, but Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion in which he completely and totally perverted the Founders’ intent by absolutising Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall” separating church and state. (A metaphor, it should be added, that was found in a letter Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury (CT) Baptist Association.) Ever since that decision, those who long for a totally secular utopia devoid of any public affirmation of religion have literally worshiped those words as inviolable absolute truth from on high. Nothing else the Founders wrote or did is allowed to alter the meaning of that
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