Bollinger, Corrigan and Peachfuzz: A Lesson in Navigation

Columbia University’s invitation, uninvitation, reinvitation absurd appearance of Ahmadinejad, and the show of refreshing but futile hostility toward him by Lee Bollinger the president of the university, has now passed into history. I've been trying to give my thoughts shape for a few days now. The whole thing was so ill considered from the beginning and has come to such a chaotic and inconclusive end that I was originally going to call this post The Ghost of “Wrong Way” Corrigan, as a reference to the epic reversals of direction and Lee Bollinger’s blind launch into a foggy night and his journey in a direction opposite to his intention. But then I read about the original “wrong way” guy, Douglas Corrigan, and I realized that the comparison was invalid.
Douglas Wrong Way Corrigan
Thanks to Wikipedia I learned that it was most likely that Mr. Corrigan had gone exactly where he had intended to go. Corrigan, it seems, had been an accomplished flyer, aviation mechanic and navigator on that foggy day that he took off from New York city headed for California and wound up a few dozen hours later in Ireland. Although he never admitted it publicly, the probable real story was that there was no chance that his diversion was an accident. In fact, he was one of the crew who had helped prepare Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis for the flight to Paris. It seems that Corrigan had applied for permission to make a trans-Atlantic flight and been denied. So, although to end of his life he never admitted it, most knowledgable observers are of the opinion that when he left New York with a flight plan for California and ended up in Ireland, he was just doing what he wanted to do and daring anyone to punish him.


Columbia University President, Lee Bollinger
I was pretty surprised that Lee Bollinger put on a good account of his promised “sharp remarks” when he addressed them to Ahmadinejad this past Monday afternoon. Having heard his address at this past spring’s graduation ceremonies, I was expecting something far more equivocal. It is not news to me that his guy can thread the ideological needle. He is smart and he is good at what he does. I just didn’t expect hat he would come out as strongly.

I have to confess that when he began his remarks to the Iranian President by saying, “Today, I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for,” I was initially impressed and relieved. As I listened, though, it dawned on me that, satisfying as it was to have the well, spoken and charismatic Bollinger give this tin-pot despot a tongue lashing was, as I had myself predicted, not a victory at all.

Much of our earliest and most basic childhood training as westerners teaches that when confronted with the facts and made to listen to them presented, appropriately, cogently and forcefully, it is not possible to deny them. The primacy of ideas, compassion, logic and fair play in our childhood indoctrination is so powerful and pervasive we cannot conceive of another way to experience the world. Thus we believe that all we have to do is find the right way of communicating and any human being is bound to see things the way we do.

I was twelve years old in October of 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev appeared at the UN and became so enraged in the debate that he took off one of his shoes and pounded it on the desk in front of him while he harangued that august assembly. This outburst was very disturbing to children in suburban American. It wasn’t so much the nuclear threat and the ominous cold war rhetoric, it was the spectacle of an adult behaving in ways that we were so thoroughly conditioned to think of as unthinkable for anyone over the age of three that disrupted our sense of what makes the world predictable and safe. I recall vividly, that one day while discussing the incident in class, one of my classmates (one of those pretty, well-dressed little girls with nice manners, I think her name was Deborah) raised her hand and said, “Well, I am going to write him (Khrushchev) a letter and tell him that he should be ashamed of himself”. The invincible confidence of a twelve-year-old girl in her ability to correct and persuade a frothing zealot is sweet and endearing; when you find the same self-absorbed, quixotic confidence in the president of one of the World’s great institutions of learning, it’s not so cute.

Bollinger, like most of the rest of the academic elite, reacts to the Islamist threat with much the same visceral sense of disorientation and threat that had my little classmate Deborah in 6th grade so worked up. In fact, the Caliphate fanaticism of people like Ahmadinejad is so disruptive to the western psyche and world view, that when we come up against a true fanatic like Ahmadinejad, those of us who do not understand that not all human beings have the same training, are unable to cope with the disorientation. This is why otherwise highly intelligent and accomplished people like Bollinger become such easily manipulated dupes; and he stepped right into full “dupe-hood” in the instant that he began addressing Ahmadinejad. Like much of the left, Bollinger is subject to extreme anxiety about the emotions and reasons of those who are self-proclaimed enemies of the west. He says to Ahmadinejad accusingly, “Do you plan on wiping us off the map, too?”

He asks a litany of plaintive “whys”-

Why have women, members of the Baha'i faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?

Why in a letter last week to the secretary general of the U.N. did Akbar Gangi, Iran's leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel Laureates express such grave concern that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world's attention from the intolerable conditions your regime has created within Iran? In particular, the use of the Press Law to ban writers for criticizing the ruling system.

Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?
Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region?

Can you tell them and us why Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq by arming Shi'a militia targeting and killing U.S. troops?

Anyone who has followed Ahmadinejad’s career and speeches already knows the answers to those questions. He has told the world what he believes but very few have listened to him. He is a Caliphate Muslim who believes the advent of the Mahdi is imminent. His vision of the Mahdi is apocalyptical and involves the slaughter and subjugation of all non-believers. He sees himself as a catalyst, or even, an instigator of this process. Bollinger didn’t break any new ground. He didn’t challenge Ahmadinejad’s religious mania. He just indulged the perennial leftist preoccupation with “Why do they hate us?”

They (the left) find Islamist rage, lying, prevarication and violence so unsettling to their infantile sense of what makes the world safe that their first priority is to attempt to regain some feeling of safety and control. Under such stress, people are often reduced to infantile and irrational behavior (why do you hate us? , but why, why?).

Bollinger eventually even tempered his strongest words, as when he said “Let's, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” He's not calling him a petty and cruel dictator, he's just saying he resembles one. It is as if he is begging Ahmadinejad to explain the unexplainable or to recant his fanaticism on the spot and exchange ideas rationally. It was pathetic really, here is his closing line, “I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better”. As I wrote before the event, it would have been better not to have put himself, Columbia and the rest of Western Civilization in that position.

He even alluded to the pernicious defense mechanism of “excessive self criticism” which many leftists indulge in when he said “We at this university have not been shy to protest and challenge the failures of our own government to live by these values; and we won't be shy in criticizing yours.” In order to feel safer in the face of the rage and hatred that they can’t explain, they make believe that it’s the “grown-ups who have to work for a living- President Bush (Bushitler), “The Multinational Corporations and Israel who are the sources of the world’s evil. It seems easier to blame them because, deep down, the lefist knows that they will not harm or scare them in any way. They are under control and subject to the same Western mores that make our society egalitarian and safe. No Columbia has never been “shy to protest and challenge the failures of our own government” why should they be? They are much safer to tweak than the murderous, hair-trigger fanatics and their beliefs which are actually the problem.

Here is a note to the rest of us: “Don’t ever look to a leftist for a positive and competent counter-attack on our enemies. Because even when they get a lot of the rhetoric right, their moral compass is so out of kilter that they fail to make the key connections. Bollinger, so far as I can tell, is as good as it gets as far as intellect and moral compass left of the center but he still strikes the primary chords of all leftist dealings with the Caliphate/Mahdi movement, “I don’t feel safe, you’re frightening me, please tell me (or at least let me believe) you are rational and have reasonable goals.” They never touch on the fact that it is a religious and a cultural hatred that is directed at us- simply because we are what we are and believe what we believe.

I'm with him on one thing, I too wish Bollinger could have done a better job. He went up against a guy who didn’t care about his ideas, his sincerity and the sharpness of his remarks. He was a great tidal wave of liberal Western Indignation but he broke on his guests fanatic, megalomaniacal will. Ahmadinejad absorbed Bollinger’s best shot and still took away exactly what he had wanted to gain from the occasion. He got to sneer in the hallowed halls of the Dhimmi, he gets to go home with the bragging rights of having counted coup on the sincere, deluded infidels of New York City.

No, President Bollinger Bollinger did not come off looking like the educator who will raise up the next generation of leaders for Democracy, he didn’t even come off as anything that might be compared to the iconoclastic, intrepid and capable Wrong Way Corrigan.

No, if anything he was more to be compared with Captain Peter "Wrong Way" Peachfuzz the world’s worst sailor from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.


Captain Peter Peachfuzz

Bollinger, in this case, seems to have no idea which end is up. Because he will not ask the right questions, he is like a navigator who refuses to read his compass. He sets out in a direction with the best of intentions and ends up thwarting those very intentions. Like a haunting living version of Captain Peachfuzz, he is a man with a big beautiful ship who cannot bring himself to steer it properly. It brings to mind an eerie Nostradamus-like echo of Captain Peachfuzz’s last voyage. The redoubtable Peachfuzz ended his sailing career by smashing his ship head-on into Lower Manhattan, cleaving into the island, and lodging on Wall Street in the very shadow of what, forty years later would become Ground Zero.

Blood for Oil- The only questions are: Whose? When? and How Much?

The Progressive Left is fond of accusing the Bush administration of trading “Blood for Oil” as if it is an unthinkable and unprecedented sacrilege. I hope it doesn’t shock anyone but, I have to tell you, Blood for Oil is a forgone conclusion. The only issue still to be decided is who's blood will be spilled and in what quantity. What do you think 9/11 was?

It's amazing, this thing never changes. When I was in the fourth grade I was called a kike for the first time. I didn't even know what the word meant. The ignorant bully approached me in a crowded boy’s room at lunch time and said "You think you’re really big, don't you? You kike." I had never been exposed to this kind of assault before. Innocent dupe that I was, I was horrified. I remember feeling his anger and being sure that he was mistaken to be angry with me. I was sure all I had to do was to explain. I didn’t know what he meant about being big- I knew that I was big for my age. I didn't even know what a kike was, although it was clear that it was not such a popular thing to be. I started to try to explain to him that I really didn't think I was so big. I never got to ask him what a kike was because he wasn't interested in the explanation. He demonstrated his indifference by slugging me- giving me my first fat lip at the same time. Bullies always project their rage and homicidal megalomania onto others. They always try to get someone else to embody the rage and disgust they feel for themselves. They are generally powerless, abused or neglected kids who do this because they are demoralized, helpless and depressed.

Oil wealth is the moral equivalent of welfare payments for despots. Just as the liberality of the U.S. and Western Europe’s welfare systems have created a permanent underclass of un-wed mothers and disadvantaged (culturally crippled) children, the un-earned ease, excessive volume and overwhelming power of oil wealth has created a global Jihad complex that is entirely independent of the normal economic restraints that life, nature and the market economy usually put on failed ideas and systems.

They are constantly being humiliated by serial eruptions of their own irrationality, ineptitude and self-inflicted defeats. Such humiliation would, under ordinary circumstances, be self-correcting- it would lead to bankruptcy, starvation, violent death, disease and dissolution of the society. Or the society would be forced to evolve to a more suitable form. This natural correction can’t happen when we keep sending them ever more vast amounts of money.

It is an odd situation. There has been no disaster they bring down on themselves, and no outlandish and anti-civil action that offends the very principals of civilization that has brought them anything but more misplaced sympathy, more money and more power to behave badly. Even military strikes like those by the U.S. against Libya and Israel against Iraq have had no lasting effect. The Caliphatist world is the pusher to the western oil junkie so they always have even more lucre with which to rebuild, redesign and make ever more devastating weapons. Meanwhile, The West is unable to see them for who they are because to see them that clearly would require that we admit that we have "An Oil Problem". We need a petroleum intervention.

We have to start talking about this. The world must come to understand what the Caliphatist’s and their leftist sycophants already know; they are awash in fabulous wealth that is theirs only by an accident of nature. Their greatest humiliation is yet to come and they, especially their leaders, can see it bearing down on them.

You see, when their oil runs out, as someday it must, their leaders know they will still be sitting there in their dessert palaces knowing that the lights are going to blink off for good, the Philippino servants they have abused and enslaved will be going home and they will have to learn how to ride camels to get around again because their Mercedes are permanently out of gas. The infamous “Arab Street” will be there too, with its short fuse and hysterical propensity for violence. The nadir of their humiliation will be that they know that for sixty years now, instead of using their unearned riches to create a better society and a more permanent source of wealth based on real productivity and creativity, they have persisted in squandering their wealth in chest-thumping vanity, internecine struggles for power and the quixotic quest to destroy Israel- a tiny country that is dwarfed in size by the Islamic world and yet dwarfs the Islamic contribution to modern society and culture.

But the problem with Islam is not just the leadership, the people too are paralyzed. They look up from their aimless lives in the street to the lavish palaces from which the leaders and Imams allow them enough of a subsidy to be essentially idle and useless. Deprived of meaningful engagement in the world by their corrupt political leaders and taunted out of any civilized instinct by their clergy, the “Arab Street” is a behavioral sink- in constant turmoil and anguish. Lacking the will to change themselves into a modern people, they have unconsciously but unmistakably committed themselves to trying to avoid the final humiliation not by growing into a better people and joining modern western culture, but by attempting to drag the rest of the world down to their level- the last resort of the bully. Cases in point are the bestial street scenes last week in Gaza in which Hamas supporters literally ripped Fatah officials to shreds with their bare hands,(here’s one of the least brutal videos)


or the Ramallah lynching of two Israelis-


It is this urge toward degradation, not sincere and spiritual religion, that is the real source of the fervor which informs their sudden renewal of interest in bringing about a world-wide Caliphate. That Caliphate would convert all the grand liberal institutions of Western Civilizations into nothing more than a world-wide network of Casbahs and Shari’a kangaroo courts. Oil wealth today foments death, repression, bigotry and hatred on a global scale.

We in The West are as right and righteous about the moral and spiritual issues as it is possible to be in this imperfect world. We are far more dynamic, free and decent culturally and socially. So why are we always finding ourselves “in the dock”- being accused, questioned and challenged by an obviously less successful and desirable culture? Follow the money. It is the Oil Loot and the Oligarchy of evil it has created. Israel and The West have both become “Davids” forced to fight a Goliath of our own making. As long as that Goliath has the money to finance the global jihad, keep (and arm) the “Palestinians” in their refugee camps and to buy outright toadies like Jimmy Carter and George Galloway, right and reason cannot fully prevail.

Trying to explain our innocence to them, talking with them about their grievances at all, is the same pathetic mistake I made in that boys room so many years ago. Their gripes about our foreign policy, their disdain for our religions and social practices, even Israel and our support of her are not the real issue for them anyway. They are tortured from the inside. Just as that boy's room bully was. The more we permit them to involve us in their crazy world of manufactured slights and endemic humiliation, the more we will get sucker punched.

The Oil Loot, even as it accentuates their feelings of personal inadequacy, has given them a buffer between them and the reality that, were they not so insulated, would force them into awareness. They are already resolved to give us "Blood for Oil". We cannot face them unprepared for it. We may be against "Blood for Oil" on principal but, given the choice, we must be willing to choose their blood over ours.

The Parable of The Dogs- Where Politics is Going

Here is a parable for you. It is a tale of four dogs- or more accurately, two pairs of dogs. One pair of dogs I own today and one pair I owned a long time ago. This is a true story of hardships survived, pampered lives and the courage to face danger for the things and people you love. It is also an object lesson in how your philosophy affects your ability to survive.

Recently I had an experience that mirrored one of the most dangerous and formative events of my life. I relived that memory while I was walking my current dogs, Harry and Jake.

Jake is a very sweet, yellow Labrador Retriever. He is also a Liberal. He is handsome, smart and wants everyone to love him. We bought him from a family on Cape Cod almost a dozen years ago. He was the runt of his litter and had been coddled accordingly. He can be irritatingly dependant at times but, then, he is so endearing you can’t help forgiving that. One night, when he was barely more than a puppy, some neighborhood kids decided to work through their changing identities, assert their newfound strength and maturity and express their uniqueness in this wondrous universe by hauling up one of the landscape timbers that we had just installed in our flower beds and throwing it through our living room window at two o’clock in the morning. We were all asleep when the window shattered and before I realized what was going on I found myself stalking barefoot around the front lawn with an aluminum baseball bat, wearing nothing but jockey shorts and a tee shirt. My wife called the police and as she was dragging me back in the house, I wondered aloud, "Where is the dog?"

Jake, who was pretty well house trained by then, was pretending that he was locked up inside his training crate. The door was wide open but Jake was lying down in there doing his best to look like he didn’t know that something had happened. Even when the police arrived, the usually gregarious Jake stayed in the crate and watched the action from there, clearly he wasn't much of a watchdog. From that moment on, we knew that Jake would always be a peaceful and compliant companion who would never intentionally hurt anyone or anything. For Jake, War is Not the Answer- ever.

Harry, on the other hand, is a Progressive. He was supposed to be a miniature poodle- that’s what the folks at the big breeding kennel told us. He never grew up. He is now six years old and the size of a smallish cat. He is a lap dog. If you have never owned or known a poodle (especially the smaller varieties) you simply can have no idea how entitled, amusing, imperious, adorable, irritating and lovable they can be. Harry struts around the house with the brisk assurance of ownership, always appearing to be on some important errand. If he doesn’t get his way he becomes petulant, often using the odd, strategically placed pile of feces and/or puddle of urine to express his displeasure when he feels slighted. Its not that he doesn’t know the rules, he just holds them in contempt- and he does it with an insolent flair. Ever since I described the argumentative strategies of the modern left as “antic nihilism” in my post about the obfuscatory style of the left, I have been unable to look at Harry without thinking of that phrase. Of course, one of the reasons Harry seems amusing and adorable in spite of the other characteristics is that he is less than a foot long and weighs less than eight pounds. He ordinarily has no real ability to cause pain or disorder. When a human progressive leaves one of their verbal piles of excrement on the floor (oh, say, “no blood for oil”, or “BusHitler” or “Israel is apartheid” for example) it is not adorable, not just because it is untrue but because it causes liberals to become upset and encourages them to behave in ways that endanger everybody.

Harry often plagues Jake. He will push between Jake and his food bowl when a treat is dropped in. When Jake is being patted or getting his belly rubbed, Harry either puts himself between the patter’s hand and Jake or harasses Jake, nipping at his ears and jumping up and down and pawing his face until Jake can’t stand it any longer and retreats from the scene. Most dogs ten times larger than Harry would maul him out of sheer irritation but Harry knows Jake too well; Jake is too sweet and gentle to hurt him. So Harry takes advantage. Worst of all, Harry’s sheer energy and willfulness leads Jake astray and drives him to get into situations he wouldn’t dream of putting himself into otherwise.

The other day I was walking the two of them in the park. We met up with another dog walking with its owner along the way and what happened next made it necessary for me to write this post.

I live in the beautiful city of Newton, Massachusetts, a densely populated but still suburban place on the western margin of the Boston urban core. It was evening and we were headed, in the dusky light, down one of the paths in the park next to my house. There was a big dog and its owner coming toward us from the other direction. I know from experience what to expect in situations like this. Harry is excitable and at the sight of the other dog approaching he began yapping, lunging and dodging hysterically. I pulled him back with the leash and switched hands, putting Jake’s leash closer to the oncoming dog and Harry on the opposite side. Jake, the craven love puppy, had already begun wagging his tail and lunging toward the other dog to make friends.

Now, I had both of them on retractable leashes that have spring loaded reels in the handles. When the reels are released the dogs can have as much as fifteen feet of line to play around with. When you want to bring the dog close to you, you can work them back by alternately pulling and letting the spring take up the slack. The problem is that when they are pulling hysterically and you are trying to get both of them back at the same time it is very difficult to make much progress. So as we approached each other I was yanking on both leashes, trying to get the dogs close enough to control.

The other dog was confused, here was Jake threatening to disjoint every vertebra in his spine in submissive wriggling and on the other side was Harry, a squirrel-sized blur of noisy aggression. The other dog seemed to be a good egg and looked to be inclined to ignore Harry and go for the friendly mutual heinie sniff with Jake; but as the two bigger dogs approached each other, Harry darted in between yipping loudly and repeatedly darting forward right in the stranger’s face. Harry has clearly been spoiled by Jake’s tolerance; he had no idea that a bigger dog could do anything other than bear his ignorant rantings politely. The other dog was not so inclined, however and he was quite overwhelmed by the variety of different stimuli that were being sent his way. He drew back and saw Jake’s bulk rushing toward him; he clearly felt the irritation of Harry’s acoustical assault and reacted out of instinct.

He nipped at Harry. In a lightning move, he grabbed Harry and gave him a quick squeeze with his teeth. It was not a serious bite; he clearly could have bitten Harry in half and had held back. He had merely squeezed with enough force and intent to warn a reasonable dog off.

I understood the strange dog’s reaction completely, what I didn’t understand at all was the reaction of my two dogs to this. Harry, scared but unreformed, ran in a wide circle, crossing his leash with Jake’s leash, tying up Jake’s legs and wrapping me in into one big loop of confusion. When he got around behind me he resumed his insane yapping and the infuriating lunging and dodging dance, thereby weaving a very complicated tangle of leash in very short order. Jake, who you might have thought would come to his little friend’s defense or at least have a moment’s pause over the violence, didn’t even seem to register it. The reserve of the other dog and the racket created by Harry just made him more anxious and spurred him to try even harder to “make friends”. He just redoubled his vigorous and subservient greeting. The other dog glanced at him and wasn’t buying it. Struggling as I was to untangle and subdue Harry, I was unable to stop Jake. The other dog growled, barked and then lunged at Jake. Just in time, I took up the slack on Jake’s leash and between the tug I got on him and the effort other dog’s owner, Jake didn’t get hurt.

That’s the best that can be said about it. No one got hurt. On the way home from that encounter I walked through the dusky sunset with these two silly, purebred dogs and recalled an encounter that I had experienced with two very different dogs a long time ago. Looking back on it, It seems a different lifetime really, it was before my divorce, watershed in anyone’s life, and it was before I became aware of The Beast. I was lucky on that day to have been with dogs of a very different political stripe.

Sammy was an odd sort of Libertarian. He was a cheerful, independent mutt who came to us from a rescue agency. He had, roughly, the look of a golden retriever but with shorter legs, a wirier coat and the stout heart of a terrier. Friendly and energetic, Sammy had had a pretty difficult puppy-hood. The story that the shelter people told us was that he had been owned by a local college student who had failed to take proper care of him. She had apparently allowed him to run freely around the campus at night had not neutered, or registered him. He had not even had any of the usual vaccinations. A little less than a year old when he arrived at the shelter, he was clearly used to shifting for himself and he had a jaunty self-assured attitude. If he didn’t get what he wanted from his people, he’d help himself.

We were actually shopping that day for a dog to be a companion for Morgan (more about her later). We found Sammy in the shelter and thought his jolly, independent but friendly personality would be a good match for Morgan and took him home that day. The very night we brought him home, we began to notice that he had become lethargic. He felt warm, and soon began to sneeze and cough. His eyes and nose were running copiously. Within a few hours we knew we had to get him to the veterinarian. It was distemper. Although they had given him the shot against distemper at the shelter, he contracted the disease there before the vaccines had had a chance to establish complete immunity.

We worried over him for three days but he was strong and the partial immunity he had gained from the belated vaccination prevailed. Morgan, our other dog hovered tenderly over him much of the time, often checking on him by pressing her nose against his neck. On the fourth day he began to recover.

Sammy was a true individual, perhaps it was the unstructured environment of his youth or maybe it was just that he was simply a true independent but he was full of quirks and odd-ball traits. Some of his quirks were funny. For instance, somewhere along the way he had conceived a liking for cigarettes. Not lit ones (at least, that we knew of) but stale butts that he would find on the street. You would be walking him down the street and look down to see him stepping nonchalantly along beside you with a butt that he had snagged on the fly sticking rakishly out of his mouth. He also had an extremely odd way of “talking to you”. He would utter a series of gasps, half barks, stifled howls and voiced panting that made it seem as if he were “speaking in tongues”. I have never heard anything like it in a dog. It was so unusual that a researcher at a local University once asked us if she could record it. Some of his quirks were profoundly touching too, as was the way, when anyone in the family was sad or ill, he would find a way of climbing up next to you in bed or on the couch and putting his cold nose against you in quiet, comforting commiseration. Perhaps he learned that one from Morgan.

Morgan was a Conservative. If we could have bred Morgan with another dog of her exact physical type and psychological makeup we would have established a new and sensationally popular breed. Morgan was a pound puppy of mixed ancestry but the mixture was a noble one. She was big. You immediately saw in her the bone structure and regal bearing of a Great Dane, the coloring, soulful eyes and rippling musculature of a Rottweiler and the handsome, broad, floppy-eared, head of a Labrador. The combination was one of impressive size, heart-catching grace and sensitive intelligence.

Her early life had been harder than Sammy’s. The shelter people intimated that Morgan might have been abused to some degree. By the time we met her she was almost two years old and fully grown. She became the most beloved dog I have ever owned. Perhaps because of her earlier deprivations, it was clear that once in our home she was determined to show us that she was grateful and deserving. She did this with dignity and strength in a thousand little ways. She kept watch on us gently, but with a dedication that surpassed instinct. Large enough to stand on all four paws and still look directly out the window, anytime there was the least noise or movement outside on the street or the back yard, she would get up, walk to the window, look out and give a deep, breathy, barely audible, “woof”. That woof said “Morgan is on guard, this is my family and I will shoulder any burden to protect it.”

Many protective dogs are unpredictable but Morgan was smart and under control. She would never hurt anything that did not threaten to hurt her or her family. I recall one day that I was sitting with my wife and kids at the kitchen table. We were waiting for a sales person to arrive for an appointment. Morgan, as she always did when we gathered as a family, was lying on the floor close by. We were talking- involved in conversation when Morgan got up and trotted briskly into the next room. This was odd. Unlike other dogs she never had that “places to go, people to see” walk when there wasn’t something of note happening. My wife and I looked at each other and I got up and followed Morgan into the other room. When I came around the corner I froze. The salesperson was a small, slightly built woman. She had come in through the side door of the house without knocking or ringing the bell. None of us humans had heard the door open, but Morgan had. She had trotted to the side door, reared up on her hind legs and placed one huge paw squarely at the neckline of the woman’s dress. The two of them were standing, motionless in the doorway a statue of homeland security twenty tears before the term came into use. Morgan, was content to wait for me to tell her what to do and the visitor was terrified beyond speech or flight. Many protective dogs would, I think have attacked and hurt an uninvited intruder. Most would certainly have made a terrifying, noisy spectacle out of it barking and snarling menacingly. Morgan didn’t need to make all that noise and she didn’t want to hurt anyone she just wanted to see to it that we were secure. As soon as I came to my senses and said, “OK, Morgan, down!” she dropped her paw, and trotted calmly away.

Then there was the time that I had a violent stomach bug. My first wife had gotten tired of me keeping her awake with my tossing and turning so she went downstairs to get some sleep on the couch. Sometime in the wee hours, I got up and went to the bathroom. I was seized with violent retching for some time. After a few minutes my wife came upstairs and into the bathroom with a look of surprise on her face. She told me how Morgan had gone downstairs to the couch, insinuated her great head under her back and lifted her to a sitting position. Then, when the woman stood up, the dog put her head into the middle of her back and pushed her gently but firmly up the stairs to the bathroom where I was in agony.

Morgan was a perfect walking dog. She adapted to the personality and purpose of the person walking her. When my first wife, who only weighed ninety-five pounds, walked her she was gentle and cooperative. When my oldest son took her out wearing his roller blades, she would pull him down the street at a wild gallop with him whooping his delight and encouragement. When I walked her she was alert, steady and serious on the leash. Walking with her through the woods or fields, even a domesticated suburbanite like me could feel the protective, reassuring, almost primal bond that evolves between a great dog and a man.

Back then I lived in Holliston, MA a much more rural place than Newton. Our regular morning walk took us out across the main road, past the small pond at the top of a hill, out along the margin of an old sand pit that had grown up in scrubby meadow, skirting a horse farm and then back through the lower end of the Sand pit where construction was starting up on a development of luxury homes. We walked at 5:30 every morning. Here in New England that means walking in darkness four months of the year and in the earliest light of dawn for another four months.

One unusually warm March morning, we were walking in the half-light when we encountered a beast of a different kind.

As we passed the horse farm, that morning, both Sammy and Morgan began to behave oddly. Sammy began to emit some of his patented yips, whines and grunts. Morgan was stepping a little faster and both of them turned their heads to look behind us. We had seen deer out there many times so I thought, perhaps they had spotted one.

But the backward glances continued and I began to notice that their demeanor was more like anxiety than the excited alertness they usually exhibited over deer. It didn’t take long for me to realize that something very unusual and threatening was happening. Something was following us. The dogs were now trying to wheel around and face whatever it was. I tightened my grip on their leashes and allowed them to turn me. There, on the trail, not more than ten feet behind us was a coyote. Not your average urban-suburban sized coyote either but one of those that some wildlife observers theorize might be the product of coyotes that have interbred with wolves. The result of that interbreeding is a strain of eastern coyotes that are much larger than normal. I was standing there with Morgan, surely one of the bigger dogs in Massachusetts, on a leash and this thing was taller than her at the shoulder by two or three inches. From that distance it could, I guessed, be on top of us in one leap.

I stared at it for a moment, long enough to realize it wasn’t gong to attack immediately. I thought that our best chance to avoid trouble was to turn slowly and walk, as calmly as possible, away. I went to turn the dogs and as I looked down I saw that Morgan was looking fixedly in that direction already. I followed her gaze and felt every hair on my body stand on end. Another coyote, larger even than the first, had used the few moments I had spent staring at the first coyote to circle around us, cutting off our line of retreat.

Now that I was facing front again, Morgan switched her gaze back to the threat in the rear. She stood with her shoulder up against my hip, a great boulder of reassurance and courage, not making a sound or moving a muscle. Sammy was with me too, on my other side, shifting a little on his paws, but clearly aware of the threat and equal to doing his part. I knew I had to take some action. I had read somewhere that yelling, throwing stones and behaving in an aggressive manner are helpful in these kinds of situations. With my heart racing, I reached down to the bottom of my vocal register and bellowed the first thing that came to my mind, "Get out of here! Get out of the way! Go on, Scram!" The coyote in front of me reacted only with a slight shift of its posture, half a question, half a fidget. I switched both leashes to my left hand and bent down to pick up a rock. I now knew that if the dogs panicked and started to move around I could be tied in a knot instantly by the leashes. I had committed to the rock in one hand but what should I do with it? Would the coyote understand the threat as a dog would? If I threw the rock, would it provoke an immediate attack or prevent it? I knew that the worst thing I could do was to stand still and let the coyotes retain the initiative. The last thing I wanted was to have a wild animal making the decisions. I took aim and threw to rock. The Coyote dodged, moving slightly to the left of the trail. In the same instant I had to make another decision: Pick up another rock or press the advantage that we had gained by putting the coyote on the defensive and making him move? I opted for the latter. Grabbing Sammy’s leash back with my now free throwing hand I started forward slowly but deliberately, continuing to yell at the top of my lungs. The dogs moved with me, both of them understanding the strategy and complying precisely. Morgan trotted sideways, watching behind and Sammy walked stiff-legged with his head down and his tail pointed up and over his head. We advanced down the trail and the coyote, having begun to move off the trail, continued to give us room as we went by. Soon they were both behind us and the tension was broken.

Now, I am going to tell you- and ask you to believe me- that I am as wary as anyone can be about ascribing human thoughts and emotions to other animals. I spent much of my undergraduate and graduate schooling reading about and doing behavioral research with primates so I have the taboo against that deeply ingrained in me. On the other hand the parallels between animals chemically, biologically and behaviorally are manifest in reality. Used with the proper judgment and qualification they are powerful and accurate tools for understanding humans in all of those dimensions. It is with this caveat that I offer the following observations.

How thankful should I be that, on that morning when I confronted those coyotes, I had a libertarian and a conservative with me? What would have happened had I had Harry dodging around me making his infernal racket and Jake doing his fawning dance of submission instead of those two rock-solid warriors?

After recalling my experience with Morgan, Sammy and the Coyotes, I began to realize that the alternate tale of Harry and Jake in the park can be seen as a nearly perfect allegory for the idiocy of much of what the left wing does. Take Nancy Pelosi’s late trip to Syria for instance. I know I’ve written about this before but its such a perfect illustration of this point…

Pelosi, like Jake, is a liberal. Modern Liberals (it wasn’t always this way, e.g. JFK) have, as one of their guiding principals, War is Not the Answer”. It doesn’t matter to them what the question is, they somehow know that warfare is never the solution. Their operational assumption is that if war is being threatened, you are simply not negotiating (talking) enough. Does a terrorist organization based in another country kill 3,000 of your people on your own soil? Oh well, let’s brew up another pot of mint tea and have a nice sit-down. It would, perhaps, be a nicer world if all that was needed was conversation- but history has proven this to be a delusion. Bloody despots like Assad, Ahmadinijad and Saddam are a reality and, like reality, they have to be dealt with- or they deal with you. Ideological pacifism is a sham, a camouflage- meant either to disguise and to excuse the spinelessness of those who refuse to stand up to an aggressor or to hide the naked political calculation of “leaders” like Pelosi who exploit the fear of confrontation to create and manipulate their power base.

As a professional politician, Pelosi’s first objective is always “popularity”. She has a liberal core constituency that she caters too. Liberals, like Jake, are sweet, friendly people but are not known for their ability to discriminate between friends and enemies. Actually most of them feel that discrimination is a bad word. In fact, one of the deepest problems of the liberal core in the United States is that they have fallen prey to the hyperemotional rhetoric of the far left. Progressives and socialists have always been very adept at “emotionalizing” key words and concepts in political discourse with phrases like “bush lied people died” and “No blood for oil” and “I care about all of the victims of Middle East violence”- and if there is one thing liberals are powerless to resist, it is an emotional appeal. This works especially well if it makes them seem (God forbid!) as though they are unfriendly or chauvinistic if they resist it. The liberals and their leaders have been so agitated and distressed by the rhetoric of the Progressive Left that they have begun to slide further to the left themselves. Liberals who used to stand up for freedom, democracy and the obvious benefits of the open and tolerant Western Tradition are now sunk in the dismal and hopeless swamp of multiculturalism and the attempt to placate and be friends with people who despise them and want to kill us all.

Lest anyone misunderstand, I want to be clear about one point. I love my dogs. That is to say, I am in no way saying that Jake is as spineless as most liberals. He, at least, reacted defensively (if somewhat hysterically- and from the safety of our enclosed porch) by barking loudly and even growling when a raccoon family was treed by a coyote here in Newton. Nor am I saying that Harry is as detestable as Pelosi and the rest of the liberal leadership. At least Harry serves a valuable function in our family. We can laugh at his antics and even I like it when he jumps up into my lap and insists that I pat his head for an hour or so. I do not intend to equate Pelosi’s power and approval hungry motives to Jake and Harry. In my experience, a dog’s motives are always above reproach. They are just doing their best to be the dogs that they are. Politician’s motives are often below contempt- and they are always mixed to some degree. I make the comparison because Jake’s sweet harmlessness is a perfect metaphor for the sadly craven liberal lust to be loved at any cost and Harry’s imperiousness mimics the far left’s antic nihilism to a “T”.

Besides, the political template of my dog’s behavior has no power to kill and enslave people. Whereas, even such a frivolous and silly exercises in tail wagging, tongue lolling and slobbering on the hand of evil as the one Pelosi indulged in Syria has serious implications. As Farid Ghadry, president of the Reform Party of Syria wrote in the Washington Times:

Pelosi's ill-timing undercuts substantive efforts by the opposition within and outside Syria to develop a meaningful democratic alternative to a hateful regime that in the end neither benefits U.S. interests nor those of the Syrian people.
It is a matter of knowing who the enemy is and what they stand for; and as Mrs. Pelosi's colleagues in Congress announced their intention to ban the term "global war on terror," it may come as little surprise that such myopic disdain for this regime's serious ill will against stability and democracy in the region seems to dominate certain policy quarters within the U.S. government.

My only disagreement with Mr. Ghadry is that where he sees “myopic disdain” I see a solid formation of tail-wagging idiots accompanied by a chorus of self-serving, yapping lapdogs. There can be no gainsaying him on one point however, this trip, “…will have serious negative repercussions for U.S. interests down the line.” We are seeing this already in Lebanon and, especially, in Iraq where jihadists and equipment flow in steadily from Assad’s Syria and her mad patron Ahmadinijad’s Iran.

Our cultural enemies are fond of calling us dogs (as well as pigs and monkeys). Well, there are dogs and there are dogs. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about Morgan. She was the finest dog I have ever known and was far too good to have been a human. I think of America in the same terms that I do that dog. Lord Byron said it best so I’ll let him close for me with this description which fits Morgan, America, our armed services, Israel, and it also embodies our hopes for our next president whomever we happen to support in the race:

“…one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man, without his Vices. This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the Memory of Boatswain, a Dog.” ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog"

Understanding vs Nonthought- Why the Left Does Evil With the Best Intentions

For three of the most interesting and stimulating years of my life, I was a professional step father to dozens of baby monkeys. I was working my way through my last two years of undergraduate studies and a three semester Master’s Degree. I was the weekend supervisor of the infant monkey nursery at one of the most renowned medical schools in the world. My hours were 12 noon to midnight every Saturday and Sunday. Despite the lack of any free time on weekends, I loved that job. It paid well enough, it came with health insurance, the monkeys were very interesting and over the one hundred and fifty or so weekends that I worked there I got to . listen to one of my great heroes speak dozens of times. After eleven PM I would begin the clean-up process. There were baby bottles to wash and data records to compile. These activities would keep me in the lab office. It so happened that on Sunday nights at eleven, one of the local college radio stations, ran a program that originated from Wayne State University in Detroit. It turned out that they had produced only a dozen or so programs for the series and because it was on in an undesirable time slot, the station repeated them over and over. Three of the programs in that rotation changed my life in a fundamental way.

These three were actually half hour segments made from an antique ninety minute recording of a speech that a man named Charles F. Kettering had given at some commemoration or dedication ceremony toward the end of his career. Kettering was, by then, one of the few surviving members of a generation of entrepreneurs and inventors that quite literally changed the conditions of human life during the early decades of the last century. Kettering was responsible for scores of inventions that changed people’s lives and expectations. Among his inventions were; the electric cash register, the diesel locomotive engine, the electric starter for the automobile, safety glass and ( what is probably the most profoundly influential of them all) the discovery of Freon gas for refrigeration and air-conditioning.

This great technologist spoke not of knowing things, shaping industry and wielding power but of how to help people’s minds to grow how to empower them to solve problems by understanding themselves and the world around them.

He told the story of his first job as a recent college graduate. He was schoolmaster in a turn-of-the-century, one room school house. One of his youngest pupils was a first grader who had already had a difficult experience in school. Although she was obviously bright and could already read at a high level for her age, she could only do it with the book held upside down. Her previous teacher had insisted that she learn to read the “right way” and refused to let her read upside down. Luckily, she kept reading and only learned to hate and fear the teacher.

When Kettering took over the school, he sized the situation up in the same way he approached all of the other problems that he would later solve in mechanics, chemistry and electronics. First he undertook to understand the whole problem. It turned out that the little girl had spent many hours in the care of her grandmother who was unable to hold the little girl on her lap and read to her in a more standard way so she would read to her by placing a book on a stool in between two chairs that faced each other and would read to her as the girl looked on upside down. Kettering knew from this that the girl was smart and motivated and could adapt to any condition. He hit on a plan that worked perfectly- with no emotional damage or condemnation of the child. He borrowed a music stand from someone in the community and placed her book upside down (rotated 180 degrees) in front of her. Then next day, Kettering turned the music stand’s holder 5 degrees clockwise. Every Monday after that he would turn it an additional 5 degrees. As the school year progressed, the girl found herself reading at 175 degrees out of the usual then 170 then 165 etc… By the end of the year she was reading just the way everyone else was and Kettering had done it without making her feel as though she was different, strange or wrong. He honored her as an individual at the same time he was correcting her because he understand the problem deeply enough that the solution became obvious. This was an example, he said, of “letting the problem be the boss”. Later in his life this slogan would be his watchword; he posted the exhortation “Let the Problem be the Boss” on the wall of his laboratory.

The trouble that most people get into when they run into a problem they have never experienced before, he explained is that they immediately try to solve it using what they already know. The more educated and “expert” the person, the greater is that tendency. Kettering advanced the idea that true solutions to problems come not from trying to fit every problem to the answers you already know but from meeting the problem on its own ground and letting it teach you what you need to know to understand it and solve it. Once, Kettering said, you “let the problem be the boss” and not try to bend it to fit your small view of the world, you begin to grow in power and ability.

I was captivated listening to Kettering talk because he had clarity of expression that perfectly reflected the genius of his insight. He made you feel as though his understanding was your understanding. Somehow I felt that this very practical man was so clear and so pragmatic that he paradoxically was talking in a perfectly spiritual and transcendent way about these quintessentially down to earth matters. He offered a glimpse into the core of our relationship with the real world and because of this he was seeing too into very fiber of the order of the universe.
I looked forward to these programs and must have heard each one of them a half dozen times. I read as much as I could find about Kettering in the library too. I took him and his philosophies to heart and he became one of my life’s heroes.

He was also an anti-authoritarian of the purest and most constructive kind. Another story he told was about an earlier speech he had given before an august assembly of academics. They had gathered to honor Kettering, Edison and a few others of the great inventors of that time. Kettering told how he had gotten up and explained to the academics that the kind of education they prized and awarded advanced degrees for was the antithesis of the kind of training that was needed to produce more innovators like the ones gathered there for honors. He related how his group of engineers had been struggling to find the right gas to serve as a refrigerant for a cooling system that GM had commissioned him to develop. They worked by their own methods for a long time with little success. Then Kettering took things into his own hands and told them to pack their things for a working retreat. Once there he had them draw a graph of all the molecular formulae they had tried so far on the wall. The graph included the composition and the properties of each gas. As they filled in the graph, it became apparent that there was one spot where all the properties of the other molecules seemed to converge to point toward the most efficient refrigerant. Kettering pointed this spot out and was immediately told by one of his slide rule wielding engineers that they had suspected that there was a molecule that would fit there for some time but that they had not tried to produce it because according to their calculations, the characteristics of the molecule would be unstable and it would not be tractable for use. Kettering insisted that they try and Freon gas was discovered. Freon served for many decades as the best refrigerant known. It made possible food preservation and shipping as we know it as well as air-conditioning and many medical and scientific research techniques that have saved and enriched uncounted lives.

Kettering ended this tale by saying that after that, he would often call meetings at which slide rules were strictly forbidden and that he insisted on re-training all engineers with advanced degrees who came to work for him.

Kettering was driven by problem solving and it is understanding- not knowledge that solves problems. He, like Newton and Einstein, knew that there was more to this Universe than any human can know or understand. As Kettering put it in his plain and firm way, “Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.” His approach to problems was to encounter a problem without preconceptions and to let the problem teach him to both know and understand it. In this way the problem becomes its own solution. Or as Kettering said, “The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution.”

In thinking about it, I have finally realized that this quinessentialy pragmatic man, whose purity of thought and purpose transformed the world around him has arrived at the same place as Milan Kundera- a man whose angle of approach could not be more different, although his transformative effect can be comparable. The crystalline intellect of the born inventor and engineer and the senitive, intuitive artist/novelist whose soul was forged between the freedom of his art and the totalitarian society he was born and raised in have intersected and their message to us is simple but vital. Recall with me the quote of Kundera’s that I used in my post about the Mainstream Media.

“The word "kitsch" describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel…Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as mass media come to embrace and infiltrate more and more of our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code.” The Art of the Novel, Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe, Milan Kundera, 1986, Harper & Row

There is a vital intersection between the thinking of these two great but utterly different thinkers and it lies in what Kettering described as knowing without understanding and what Kundera calls “received ideas”. These “received ideas” that Kundera writes about, are simply the preconceptions by which we explain the world to ourselves. They do not constitute real understanding they are merely a superficial knowledge, a set of ideas which the great numbers of our fellows accept uncritically. They are the intellectual cocoon within which we shelter ourselves from dangers real and imagined, where we reassure ourselves of our goodness and anesthetize our anxieties. The extent to which we accept the complete verity of these received ideas is the exact measure of our indulgence in kitsch, that desire to enlist the sympathetic emotions of the “greatest number”.

The dominant kitsch of our age in the west are surely the fetishes of the left. They are the very means by which the left attempts to analyze and solve every problem by fitting them into “what they already know” rather than understanding them on their own terms. Hence, the persistent and obdurate refusal to believe in the threat posed by the bloody and brutal Caliphate Islamists. Because, for instance, they already “know” that multiculturalism is a universal and that according to its dictates “all people are brothers”, they cannot see that this sweet but dangerously mistaken belief is not shared by many other cultures. They also already know that all of humanity are brothers and that if you treat your enemy with dignity and resolve your problems by talking them out there is never any need to have a war. These seem like nice principals but they are deeply flawed and not universally shared, in fact, the Islamists view them as a fatal weakness to be exploited.
The pathetic retreat into these bland (and blind)assertions without testing in reality are what Kettering calls “…a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence”, Kundera calls “nonthought”. Here is Kundera:

“Nonthought. This cannot be translated by “absence of thought”…We cannot say that an absence is aggressive, or that it is spreading. “Nonthought,” on the other hand, describes a reality, a force; I can therefore say, “pervasive nonthought”, the “nonthought of received ideas”; “the mass media’s nonthought”; etc.”

I was watching Bill O’Reilly interview Whoopi Goldberg recently and she said something in the exchange that clarified the whole issue for me. O’Reilly was questioning her on the reluctance that she and other celebrity activists show to support their activist positions with discussions of logic, fact and substance. At one point Goldberg, talking about fellow celebrity Tim Robbins, said, “Well, I think he's very clear that he is not for the war in Iraq. It's not a new stance that he's had. He's also for years been a peace activist. So this can't come as a surprise to anybody.
No. 2, when I take a stance on something, all I can talk to you about it how I feel about it and why. And I don't have to justify it, and you don't have to listen to it. But it is important for everyone to know that they have an opinion and they have a — have a right to express it.”

I was astounded. In one short statement Ms. Goldberg was recorded trying nearly every trick in the left’s version of Kundera’s Kitsch list- she attempts to get away without answering his arguments with clear reasons by playing the “everyone is entitled to their opinion” card, and then claiming that that is “just how she feels” This is a perfect example of leftist nonthought in action.

In our ongoing quest to find ways to reason, alarm, intimidate and ridicule the left and liberal west into full awareness of the challenge and danger that our civilization faces, one of our most valuable resources must be the tradition of pragmatic problem solvers, like Kettering, that have made some of our greatest contributions to the comfort and progress of our species. Another inspiring influence is the experience of those who have lived in other cultures and come to ours with an appreciation that, if we listen to them, makes us realize once again how lucky we are to live in a culture that, though it is not perfect, is the best that humanity has managed thus far and is the only reasonable hope for continued improvement. In this essay I have attempted to pull those two streams together to show that the one thing they exemplify most of all and their clearest difference from the insolent and counter-productive left is an honest desire to understand rather than react emotionally.

Ms Goldberg speaks in half truths with half sentences. We must continue to advocate real understanding. When she says, “everyone is entitled to their opinion” she has omitted the most important part of that assumptive sentence- the other half is “no matter how ill considered and uninformed it may be.” The entitlement to opinion and expression is not a validation of content- in fact, it is a call for responsibility. Equal rights to speak them doesn’t mean all opinions are of equal value it means that they should to be considered and supported rather than merely indulged.

The first recorded declaration of that responsibility in U.S. history came in the fall of 1787 when a woman approached Benjamin Franklin immediately following the concluding session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and asked “What form of government have you given us?” Franklin replied: "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

We cannot allow ourselves to be lulled by the easy appeals to emotion and received ideas contained in Ms Goldberg’s typical liberal glibness. No matter how secure we feel we must realize that we have enemies. As the usually non political Kettering said, “The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, requires "blood and sweat and tears."”

Indian Guilt and the American View of Islam Part II

There is not a square acre of habitable land on the face of the earth that has not been inhabited by an earlier human population than the one that lives on it today. When the white man came to “The New World” he was not, as some (Lawrence’s “highbrows”) would have it, invading a pair of continents that had been under the stewardship of a single people, living peacefully and in harmony with nature for thousands of years. He was stepping onto a perpetual battlefield where the inhabitants had arrived in successive waves of occupation, conquered and re-conquered each other, committed repeated savagery upon each other and permanently changed the character of the environment. Human sacrifice, slavery and constant low-intensity warfare were universal across both North and South America before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans who trickled in for the first three hundred years and then poured in in immense numbers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to escape religious persecution, political domination and limited economic prospects in their home countries. They came here and founded the greatest experiment in liberty, prosperity and self-government ever seen on earth. Without their descendants and The United States of America, the national socialist and communist monsters of the twentieth century could not have been defeated and would have dominated the earth. You can, as I do, feel compassion and even nostalgia for the American Indians but you can only lament their replacement as the dominant culture in the Americas if you believe that life on earth would be better had they not been conquered.

Did I say “conquer”? Yes, I know that the word “conquer” is out of fashion these days. It makes most people very uncomfortable because it is redolent of violence, greed, slavery and colonialism. In this post colonial age The West has a very guilty conscience about all of that and its not that we don’t deserve it. Conquest is a messy and spontaneous process and it gets exceedingly ugly at times. Conquest by force is bloody, and even conquest by cultural conversion can look very harsh. The fact remains, to paraphrase D.H. Lawrence, when cultures that are as different as Western Civilization and the American Indians meet, one must prove fatal to the other.

We in The West try very hard to keep from thinking about conquering anything. Some of us are even ashamed that our culture is so successful and powerful that most of the conquest we do these days is of the non-violent, social and cultural kind. There are any number of leftists who speak of western “cultural hegemony” as if it were a bad thing. They bemoan the loss of native cultures and the metastasization of Hollywood product around the globe while ignoring that fact that the reason why it is happening is that our culture is dominant for good reasons- it offers better protection for the less powerful and it provides better economic opportunity than any other. It is fine for leftists and progressives to bemoan the spread of democracy and capitalism but precious few of them would want to live under any of the alternatives. It is, still, a conquer or be conquered world but we are so used to having our own way and becoming dominant wherever in the world we happen to be that we have forgotten how hard the fight for survival can be and how quickly it can turn desperate. We really need to keep reminding ourselves that just because we no longer have the urge to conquer that no one else does.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali arrived in Europe along with the current wave of Immigrants from Islamic countries but she arrived not as an economic refugee trying to find a way to survive but as a refugee of conscience and belief. Most of the refugees from the failed economies of the Islamic world have not come with her open-minded intent to learn western ways.

Ironically, the guilt and loss of confidence in The West has allowed the Islamic immigrants in Europe to begin the process of degrading European culture. By shear weight of numbers and inert recalcitrance they have been insisting that their traditional and legal practices be accepted by their new home countries even when they are counter to existing law. In an attempt to pacify and integrate their new citizens Germany, Belgium, France, Britain and others have been allowing more and more exceptions in their legal and social fabric, exceptions that will make those countries more like the poverty stricken and depressed countries from which the immigrants fled and less like the productive, welcoming democracies they thought they were moving to. Europe, typified by the French, has been arrogant and complacent enough to believe that what they imagine to be the grandeur of their culture would turn all of their Muslim immigrants into Western European citizens. Now their streets and Metros are plagued by chaos and violence.

In Holland, Hirsi Ali found the Dutch (who have been as conscientiously open-minded and egalitarian as any other country in Europe) to be under siege as well. They have suffered two traumatic assassinations. One was the murder of the prominent politician, Pim Fortyun. The other was of the well-known film-maker Theo van Gogh who was the director and producer of “Submission” the film, written by Hirsi Ali. Submission, only ten minutes long, touched on one of the great vulnerabilities of Islam in the modern world- the repression of and discrimination against women.

No more volatile subject exists for Muslims. The subjugation of Muslim women and their possible liberation by continued contact with The West is the one subject, other than the dignity of The Prophet himself that is absolutely guaranteed to roil Caliphate Muslims to unreasoning savagery.

Hirsi Ali, under threat of death herself has since taken refuge in the United States and recently published a wonderful autobiography, Infidel. Reading Infidel, I am vividly reminded of the lesson I learned in that lecture hall almost forty years ago. In the first two chapters of her book it becomes clear that this extraordinary woman grew up in a family that, in the span of two generations was dislocated from its nomadic tribal roots and thrust into the turbulence that occurs when ancient cultures come into contact with the modern world. The clarity with which she describes the drama of the conflicts that arise when t simple culture that is specifically adapted to meet the demands of a narrow band of ecological and social conditions is confronted by radical changes in both the natural and social environment is striking.

Her father’s father was, she tells us, a feared nomadic raider and petty feudal lord. His name was Magan and was known by the title: The Protector of all He Conquered. As ironic as that name may sound to us, it speaks volumes about the world in which her parents grew up. That title is a holographic representation of Caliphate society. It can be used as an entry point into a more complete understanding of the nature of the proto-feudal strain of Islam that has interbred with modern fascist movements and evolved into a monster. His “might” made Magan “right”, for the people he conquered, it was a matter of good luck that he protected them. The title does not even imply that he was just or fair- only that he kept them under his protection kept them from the additional trauma of being conquered by others. Conquering and being conquered is the story of the human race and whether the conquest is violent or cultural, we ignore this at our own risk.

This brings us back to Lawrence’s idea that. “The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled.” If the two ways of consciousness are fatal to the other, then it must be obvious that there is a contest for survival going on whether the contestants wish this to be the case or not.

So, now we are ready to answer the question, posed above, “Has the western conquest of the Americas has made the world a better place? Is it lamentable?”

The left finds a way to lament. They claim to see no difference between the moral authority of the American experiment (even as they are sheltered under its protective mantle) as compared with Caliphatist Islam. Moral imbeciles like Ward Churchill, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and a host of others promote relativistic absurdities that equate the actions of America and Israel to those of al Qeada and Ahmadinejad and find ways to excuse the violence of those thugs and bullies.. Their arguments are based on that same fulsome emotion, dressed up to look like real discourse.

They do this by establishing certain constructs of “received knowledge” that they try to convince us cannot be challenged. This un challengability is an emotional barrier to free speech and intellectually honest debate. When you ignore the emotional prohibition they are challenged with ease and found to be nothing more than emotional absurdities.

Multiculturalism is chief among these absurdities. Originally conceived as an expression of the bland but laudable liberal impulse to “honor differences” and acknowledge the diversity of cultural influences, multiculturalism has become an overbearing burden to never offend or even “judge” the views and behaviors of other cultures. If rejecting the moral relativism of Multiculturalism seems “insensitive” to us today it is because we have been badgered into buying the premise that all cultures are equally deserving and good. This is absurd.
People like Hirsi Ali, for instance, who have lived in some of these other cultures, know how absurd it is. Hrisi Ali knows first hand the horror of being a woman in Somalia and Saudia Arabia. I have used this quote before but it bears repeating here.

“This is gender inequality: an inequality most obscene, expressed through acts such as mutilation, beatings, rape and murder--and almost all this aggression is justified in the name of culture and creed. Atrocities committed against girls and women in the most intimate setting of all: in the home; by dad or mom; by a brother or a sister; by a husband or his mother. The sort of persecution I talk about is one in which the religious leaders, the politicians, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers, all share the staunch belief that girls--that women--are born of a lesser god.”

So why can’t we stand up as a civilization for women everywhere? Why do the feminists in The West prefer to quibble about salary differentials in the upper echelons of corporate leadership to campaigning to end the rape, torture and murder of Islamic women? Can they really be that morally blind? Is multiculturalism such an important idea that we have to sacrifice our moral souls and another generation of women and children? Why?

Part of it is that we are genuinely touched by the pathos of cultures like those of the American Indian which we have defeated and incorporated into our own. This melancholy reluctance to effect any change in the culture of others is illogical and misguided. It is driven by the guilt that we can’t stand to talk about, acknowledge or even think about. The guilt of knowing that our great standard of living humiliates other people who don’t live as well is the silly, racist core of the multiculturalist urge. We dearly want to be able to tell them that they are not really humiliated so they won’t be angry with us anymore but we know that this is a lie. In doing so we perform the worst act of humiliation of all, we let them off the hook. In not helping to them to see their position truly, we commit a much worse act of racism- we admit that we don’t think they are up to meeting the truth head on.

We have bought into multiculturalism because we no longer have the fortitude, the honesty or the intelligence to look someone in the eye and tell them, “Look, you are humiliated because you do not have the culture or political leaders or the education to be otherwise. You really need to stop making such a big deal about feeling humiliated. Why not try some of these simple steps toward civilization instead:
1. Specifically outlaw honor killing
2. Stop beating your wife and/or kids.
3. Send your kids to a decent school where they won’t waste their time memorizing an entire “holy book” to the exclusion of learning critical thinking skills and studying arithmetic, science and geography.
4. Forget using Israel, Jews and America as the excuse for being a looser.
5. Understand that your leader (fill in one: Ahmadinejad, Assad, Kadafy, Mubarak, Abdullah etc…) is a tyrant of the worst sort and is actually working hard to keep you ignorant and filled with rage, that’s how your feudal system works.
6. For God’s sake stop thinking of anyone who believes (or doesn’t believe in him) in him (God that is) in a different way than you do as less than human. That only makes you feel worse when you see that those “unbelievers” live better than you do.
If you take care of all that, there would be no need for you to feel humiliated anymore.”

David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian is one who poignantly understands the culture clash from the inside. His work is proof that the valiant Indian traditions of his culture can, if victimhood is refused and intellectual honesty is applied, be part of a modern western world view. Yeagley has written at length about the comparison between the Indian and the Palestinian Arab world. His writing offers the Arabs hope for dignity if they will only drop their humiliation speeches and stop pretending that they are better than the rest of the world. They would be much better off if they learned to follow his lead into the twenty-first century. Yeagley writes,

“Arabs weren’t even in Palestine until the mid-7th century AD, over a thousand years later, after Palestine’s 1,300-year Jewish history. Arabs later living in Palestine never developed themselves or the land, but remained nomadic and quasi-primitive during their 1,200-year stay.
Then a stronger people modern Jews who’d been expelled from their homes in Europe and in Arab countries came in and conquered (without annihilating) the Palestinian Arabs.
As a Comanche Indian, I’m sensitive to this history. I believe the conqueror has a right to what he has conquered. No one owns the land. Only he who is strong enough to possess it will control it and the people living on it. That’s the law of war…,”

He also quotes Theodore Roosevelt:

“Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Let sentimentalists say what they will, the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a standstill." (W. T. Hagan, Theodore Roosevelt and Six Friends of the Indians, 1997). In the end his final telling comment echoes out theme of culture succession, “The land developers, the agrarians, have become stronger than the hunters.”

When D.H. Lawrence wrote “The common, healthy, vulgar white usually feels a certain native dislike of those drumming aboriginals.” He was expressing, albeit in a dated and innocent way, the view that when you live in a world that has more than one culture, there are often “others” who are “unsuited” for life in that culture. At the border lines between cultures the differences as so much more apparent We can’t admit to that feeling anymore- we are too sophisticated and sensitive, too multicultural. But we have to understand that Western Civilization is (at least for the time being) the dominant culture and we have to turn that coarse dislike and revulsion into a realization that the reasons that we find those people either dislikable or adorable come out of the same basic elitism. If we are to treat them as true equals we need to level with them and tell them that the reason for their humiliation is in their culture and their leadership. We also have to take the prudent steps to protect ourselves.

We do need to protect ourselves. We may be blinded to the danger because we are so sure of our safety and our ability to manage social change. We are so confident that we have created a culture that is immune to relapse into tyranny and intolerance that we have felt free to indulge multiculturalism. This is not the case for the other side however. They are not multicultural. The Caliphate Muslims can see the fatal nature of the confrontation so much more clearly because they are the ones who are threatened most immediately by it. Since the end of World War II the influx of oil money, the amazing revolution in globe-shrinking communication technology and the creation and phenomenal success of Israel right on their door step have combined to expose the Arab world to Western culture in a way threatens every dark secret abuse and humiliation. When communication was primitive and Israel was not turning fetid swamps and arid desert into fertile farmland using Arab labor right next door the Arab "leaders" could deny to themselves and hide from their people how lame and infantile they are. Without the artificially maintained veneer of rage and "humiliation speak" that they have paid so dearly to foster, the Arab leadership would be exposed, alone in the spotlight, as the incompetent, despotic ignorant rabble that they are. The Arab Street we hear so much about is the tool of the Arab leadership. They know only too well that the rage, anti-Semitism, anti-American and humiliation idiocy that the drill into their followers is their only screen against being so exposed.

Meanwhile, under the influence of multiculturalism the Left looks at the Palestinians and, as Lawrence might have said, “…performs the mental trick, and fools themselves and others into believing that the “head scarfed”, Kalashnikov toting darling is nearer to the true ideal gods than we are.” That, of course, is mind numbing nonsense- “fatal to our way of consciousness” as Lawrence had it. But to the left it is irresistible; it is full of guilt, pity and bathos – “fulsome emotion”. If The West will commit suicide – the unwillingness to give up both the ugly side and the maudlin of that racism will surely will be the weapon.

One of the two cultures, Islam or The West, must conquer the other and if the end of the conquest is to be humane, there must be a clear winner. Someone has to admit they have been conquered. At the end of the Indian wars there were many moments of despair, bitterness and regret which still haunt America. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe gave voice to the Indian defeat in a speech that is both dignified and noble:
"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

It took several generations and much bloodshed to force that speech out of an Indian. It took another one hundred and forty years for an intelligent and realistic spokesman like Yeagley to put into words the brutal truth that will allow him and his people to go forward as full citizens of the new world of which they are now a full part.If we cannot get the Arab world to make that same transition peacefully, we will have to reduce them by force the way we did with Chief Joseph.

We have to ask ourselves how dedicated we are to this struggle, how hard are we willing to fight to insure that our children do not have to live through a (not yet inevitable) slide into a new dark age- for an ascendant world-wide Caliphate would bring on a very dark age indeed. Anyone who doubts that need only see how the Shia and Sunni are savaging each other for dominance in Iraq. How willing are we to fight for freedom and do we have the courage to see what is required of us - and to do it.

If we cannot find a way to free ourslelves from the dogma of the left and drop multiculturalism so that we can fight with our whole minds, media, hearts and intellects we will have to continue to fight with tanks and bombs. Ultimately, we have to find both the intelligence and mental agility for the cultural approach and the will and strength for the forceful one. If we do not start soon then we might as well avoid the apocalyptic rush and start shopping for turbans and bhurkas now.

Update, Friend Eric Odessit posted this article which has a very promising resemblance to what a an Arab equivalent to Cheif Joseph's speech. It is dignified, realistic and forward-looking.

OK, This is Really Why They Hate Us !

I am a little overwhelmed by the reception that this first chunk of the promised Big Post has received. A lot of you have linked it and commented in various ways. While I am grateful for the response, I feel that one of those strains of commentary needs a clear answer. Many of you have written strongly worded responses saying things like: Islam is hateful and that, in essence, hate is what Islam and the left have in common. One of the reasons I find this disturbing is that I am always tempted to agree with it.

It is too simple and easy, though. I see hate as more of a symptom than a cause. The whole thing with Islam and the left is pretty complicated and hate is so simple. Let me try to summarize how I explain their relationship.

The problem is that hate usually grows out of a conflict that appears not to be resolvable. In the case of the Caliphate Muslims, they see much more clearly than westerners can that co-existence is not a possibility. Even if they wished it, which some of them might, it has to be clear to them that the vitality, openness and power of the west will eventually cause their totalitarian controls to disintegrate. This is why they feel humiliated. They know that the simple fact of our existence is fatal to them. This is why the lack of humor is so striking.

In the same way, the left feels kinship with them because they share that same doomed feeling of futility and humiliation. The Modern Left knows that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Capitalization of China, successful modernization of India, Mexico and much of the old Soviet block and the defection of the best minds (Hitchens, Podhertz, Kristol, et al) they are no longer the “Modern Left”, they are merely “What’s Left”. It has never been more apparent that their ideas are mawkish, cheap and unworkable.

Both the left(overs) and the Caliphate Muslims hate us out of their envy, stubbornness and hurt pride. We don’t humiliate them- they humiliate themselves and that infuriates them.

This is not to say that the battle is won. If we cannot wake up our felloe westerners who have been put to sleep by the excess of power and safety that we have had since WWII, we can lose. We need to stop getting into futile shouting matches with the progressives and socialists and find ways to talk meaningfully to the parts of the liberal left and center that is as yet unaware of the monstrous evil at the gate. Our survival depends on it.

I have many more thoughts about the underlying cause of the hatred and I’ll be posting them soon…

The Emergence of the Agélaste Left

Dear Reader,
That big post I've been promising has gotten to be so big, I've had to break it up and publish it in smaller bites. Here's one:

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

Hannah Arendt

I was walking my kids to school the morning after the last Presidential election when I witnessed an embarrassing spectacle. As my sons and I approached the school I saw a neighbor of ours, a young mother of two elementary school students, jumping up and down on a map of the United States that was painted on the asphalt of the school yard. She was shouting something. As we got closer I could see that she was jumping repeatedly on Ohio and shouting “I hate you Ohio!” over and over. She looked at me, and said, “I can’t believe they did this! Can you believe it?”

Well, actually, there were two things I couldn’t believe. The first, thing I found unbelievable was the violence she displayed. Violence? Well, yes, it was minor violence but it was pretty shocking in a symbolic way, shocking in much the same way that burning the American flag is shocking.

The other thing I couldn’t believe was her presumption.

Call me old fashioned; or just chalk it up to my being in the conservative minority in this very liberal, high income suburb that I live in, but I have always thought it was good form not to make a public display of my political opinions. Stumping in support of a candidate before the election is different; a respectful request for support for people and ideas you believe in is an honorable part of our civic tradition. But this was a bald faced assumption that as a person she assumed to be “good” I would be equally dismayed by the result of the election. I can tell you that I generally avoid that kind of assumption about other people and nearly every time I have let myself slip into it I have been embarrassed by the result. But embarrassment is only experienced by those who are willing to grant others the dignity of having their own thoughts.

In my last post I quoted Milan Kundera on Kitsch. I need to go back to Kundera and that same speech, his Jerusalem Address, once again to most accurately define what I found so offensive in this presumption. Kundera uses the word agélaste. Rabelais, he tells us, coined the word to denote people who do not laugh because they have no sense of humor and “…are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are.” My neighbor’s behavior, that morning fit that definition to a tee.
The moderate and progressive left for all its claims of good intentions and intellectual righteousness has for some time been slipping into a form of totalitarian fundamentalism. The totalitarian progressive left is, I fear an, as yet, undiagnosed epidemic among the upper middle class and the academic and political elites of Western Civilization. As with most epidemics, it has been hard to define in its early stages. In recent years however, it has begun to manifest itself in ways that are impossible to ignore.

For instance, why is there a marked and growing support for Islamism among the left-leaning sectors of the western countries? On the face of it, it makes no sense that a movement within the Muslim world that declares publicly that it wants to either kill or convert everyone else on earth to Islamism, which believes in slavery, misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, gay bashing(and murdering!), religious intolerance (exclusivism, really), the teaching of hatred and murder to kindergarteners and the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians with terror should be lionized by people who profess to hold “humanitarian” ( or, at least, humanistic) values above all others. Why, too, does that same left-wing so despise Israel, a country founded in Democracy, having a strong socialist component, and which far out shines any of its neighbors in human rights and minority freedoms? The answer to this conundrum is one of the diagnostic markers that prove the existence of a totalitarian system of belief. When there are such obvious internal contradictions that are held by a self-identified group of people who police each other for the correctness of their thought without regard to the actual logical content of that thought it is totalitarianism. I discussed this in my post about Islamofascim. Here is part of a quote from a New Yorker Magazine article by Louis Menand that I used to illustrate the point. “The mysterious part of totalitarianism’s appeal—and here we return to the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen—is that its official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it. This is because the mob is made up of cynics; for them, everything is a lie anyway. And the masses’ hostility is free-floating. It has no concrete object: the masses are hostile to life as it is. The more extreme and outrageous the totalitarian ideology, therefore, and the more devoid of practical political sense, the more ineluctable its appeal.”

This is where the agélaste’s lack of a sense of humor turns lethal, for the hard core of any fascist system is the agélaste. Eliminating humor is essential to the totalitarian system. In His novel The Joke, Kundera has a Communist sympathizer saying, “No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.” A sense of humor would allow people to see the irony in the internal contradictions and turn laughingly away from it. The modern Progressive, leftist and liberal movements lack any real humor. What passes for humor in those precincts is actually more accurately classified as ridicule and mockery. While driving the other day I saw an excellent example, bumper stickers that read, “So Many Right-Wing Christians So Few Lions”. This is not humor. It is, rather, a kind of puerile, jejune attempt to wrap a hate message in a clever phrase and hurl it through the windshield of any car that had the misfortune to be driving behind. This is the very sort of message that the owner of that car would, no doubt, condemn utterly if it were aimed at any of the liberally approved minorities. How would he respond to- “So Many Black People, So Few Lynch Mobs”? I can’t see how one is any worse than the other. Political correctness, tone deaf “humor” and the conceit of “true belief”, are turning the mainstream left into a confederacy of Agélastes.

This by no means applies to all left-leaning citizens; there are many clear-thinking individuals on both sides of the center who can see these contradictions clearly enough to be troubled by them. For those with the good will and intellectual freedom to debate and consider the evidence on both sides, there is hope. If they can also avoid the paralysis that results from moral relativism they will be part of the solution of the problem. The problem arises from those who become devoted to anti-establishment worldviews to the extent that their individual intellect and discriminatory power becomes subservient to the intellectual framework of that “ism”. They come to believe that Jews and the corporate business world and government are somehow controlling their lives. They feel that in retaliation they have to support an extreme brand of progressive liberalism that is a true totalitarian ideology. In the grip of this reactive totalitarianism they no longer care about their own contradictions, as Menand pointed out above. This agreement to believe in and support the absurd is the binding energy that allows so many “liberals and progressives” to ignore the obvious contradictions between the values they profess and their sympathy for Islamism (and antipathy for Israel). As Voltaire wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

Totalitarian systems loath each other but they hate the individual human being, his sense of humor and his free thought much more. That is why the Totalitarian left and Caliphate Islam find common cause with each other. In each of them, it is the system not the people in it or the ideals they hold that are important; the individual is an object of suspicion and disdain. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous,” The devotion to a strict fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran and the seemingly opposed devotion to the total and complete adherence to the intellectualized principals of the western left differ in their content but not in their disregard for reality and the complex nature of humanity.

This is why so many elite campuses are so inhospitable to Jewish and Christian speakers of any but the leftist point of view while they positively swoon in reverence over speakers from Islam who represent terror as an instrument of social control, the subjugation of women and death or conversion for all unbelievers. Even left wing speakers who do not toe the Agélaste Left party line are drowned out and not allowed to speak in today’s academia. Speakers of both the left and right who dare defy the intellectual Taliban of academia and support Israel or speak in support of American values are routinely harassed, drowned out and intimidated socially, academically and even physically. This is a universal characteristic of totalitarians of any stripe, they are more comfortable with other totalitarians, no matter how diametrically opposed their ideas, than they are with those who can see and point out the absurdity of their slavery to empty ideas and pathetic rationalizations.

It is no accident that Academe is a stronghold of the Agélaste Left. In the hothouse of tenure, and with loyal cadres of duped and inexperienced students who eagerly shout down any opposition, the modern University is the last and most secure refuge for bright but craven and bone-lazy “geniuses” who spin vivid verbal riffs on their wishful dreams of what the world is like even as they are entirely insulated from the harsh realities that the business people and workers they so smarmily patronize have to face every day. Socialism and Communism have failed everywhere they have been tried except in the hermetically sealed aviaries of academia. Year after year the tenured Macaws of the professorate gather their favorite toadies up into their own self-congratulating ranks and push the rest out into the “real world” for which they have conspired to keep them ill-equipped. Thinking independently in some regions of academia calls down a fate worse than death- expulsion into the market place where only production of goods and services for which others will pay money earns a living. This is how the elite corps of the Agélaste Left terrorizes its true believers to believe even past the point of self-destruction.

It is shocking but not surprising that the hierarchies of some of the mainline protestant churches have become hotbeds of the Agélaste Left. One need look no further than the Israel Divestment movements within both the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. To see that the hierarchies of these two once-great churches have been hijacked by leaders that are in step with the collectivist progressive hostility to the war on terror here and in the Middle East is to witness the greatest and saddest irony of all. It is shocking and ominous that decades of inter-faith bridge-building has been so swiftly undermined by this totalitarian wave of blind Agélaste Leftism among mainline religious leaders. The Agélaste Left leaders of these churches do not speak for the masses of Presbyterians and Episcopalians in the pews. There are strong indications that there is little grass root support for the attempt to handcuff Israel in her life and death fight with a foe that has sworn to destroy her and has openly promised to kill as many Jews and Christians as possible. Those leaders are merely trying to put words into the mouths of their flocks. What is worse, they do it in the name of God. Only to them, God apparently is a leftist who would rather see misguided even-handedness weaken the hand of an egalitarian, religiously tolerant, democratic and egalitarian country like Israel against the blood-thirsty onslaught of another totalitarian movement most of whose own people, when they are given the opportunity to choose, would rather live in America or Israel.

On the other hand, none of those on the left who reflexively bash America and Israel for “crimes against humanity” are crowding onto airplanes to go live under The Caliphate and Sharia rule either. I think it’s safe to say none of them would last a month in a country ruled by Sharia Law. Indeed, they would be lucky to only have their hands cut off rather than be buried up to their waists in the dirt and be stoned to death or have their heads sawn off with a bread knife in front of a video camera.

Neither do they give us a convincing picture of anything (within reason) that America or Israel could do to please them. Israel, they seem to feel, should lay down her arms and try to make a unilaterally disarmed peace with the Arab world- that Arab world that has sworn Israel’s destruction and is holding the Palestinian refugees hostage against her existence. That would please the Agélaste Left doubly. Israel would then be unable to stop the terrorists or interrupt their infrastructure; and then, shortly thereafter, there would be another genocide- the death of all the Jews in Israel- that they could condemn America for not stopping. If its one thing the Agélaste Left enjoys more than mourning dead Jews, it’s blaming America and finding fault with the very institutions that shelter them and their self-destructive antics from annihilation by the despots, terrorists and repressive maniacs they so lionize.

You know that they are the Agélaste Left because anyone with even a rudimentary sense of humor would see the irony of that!