Where in the World  Are We Headed?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/20/20

            Calls for unity from presidential candidate Joe Biden, if heeded, would lead only to fake unity. These are no longer the more cordial times of Reagan and Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neil or, more locally, of Johnny Isaacson and Roy Barnes.

            Biden’s call for unity was preceded by four years of Democrat rejection of Donald Trump’s “illegitimate” presidency, not to mention name calling: Russian spy, traitor, racist, and self-serving egotist. And now we’re being urged by the oh-so-conciliatory Democrat candidate to join together and be civil?

            Come together, they say. The election is over. No, there are a few more steps between now and January. Media stars don’t get to “call” elections. Voters do. Meanwhile, as those legitimate steps are being taken, Democrats  who dragged a duly elected president through the mud, refused to attend his inauguration, and sanctimoniously looked down on his 63,000,000 unwashed, uneducated supporters are now calling for unity. And don’t forget “Russia, Russia / collusion, collusion / impeachment, impeachment and ventilators, ventilators.”  Hypocrisy, thy name is Democrats. 

Never before has politics been about so much more than just politics.  Aristotle’s definition of politics was “the affairs of the polis,” the city, that is. Aristotle lived when great city-states like Athens and later Rome were the centers of power. Nations as we know them now with distinct borders were yet to come. Localism, not distant governance, was the order of the day. “The affairs of the polis,” of course, always involved power, and power is addictive. It’s the drug of the emotionally needy.  

This is not to say that all who hold political office are power-hungry. Cincinnatus wasn’t and had to be persuaded to leave his fields to lead Rome. George Washington wasn’t, refusing all efforts of the few who wanted him to be a king (Hamilton among them, duh! Kings are what we gained independence from!).  

Yes, politics is now more than politics, far more than love of and care for the polis. It is now the ideological vehicle upon which revolutionaries have hopped and seized the steering wheel. How else do we explain the Democrat defense of the Black Lives Matter organization? (I said the organization, not the concept which, even so, has been sullied; all lives matter.) And Antifa? How many Democrat leaders have disavowed them? Had Portland been burned down by right wing thugs instead of by the Democrats’ ideological buddies, Democrats would have gone ballistic.

Leftist politics is now anchored to the notion of “transforming” the nation. Transform the police, the electoral college, the Supreme Court, health care, our narrow, out-of-step notions of human sexuality, our union itself by creating more states (guess why), and most transformative of all, the definition of free speech. The 1960’s flower children heralded free speech to the strains of Peter, Paul and Mary yet their grandchildren have turned free speech on its head. If it’s news they don’t like, that news is a “conspiracy theory.” If it’s you they don’t like, you’re canceled.

And of course the Covid “pandemic” (let’s talk about that word) has not been wasted by the President’s enemies. A pandemic is “an outbreak of disease that affects many lands.” Pan, the goat-headed Greek god of nature, darted everywhere around and outside the city. His name is always in reference to the number of nations, not the depth of a disease within a nation. Divide 330,000,000 (the USA’s population) into 11, 025,046 (the number of cases as of this writing). Divide 330,000,000 into 246,108 (the number of deaths). Then decide whether or not you really need to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas.

So where are we headed? Toward unity with those who are ho-hum about infanticide? Toward more non-ending wars? Toward Biden-Bernie socialism/theft that takes from producers (the villagers) and gives to the village (the government)? Toward sanctimonious Christians who can’t forgive and forget a President’s past? Toward forgetfulness of a billionaire president who energized good, common sense folks?

These questions will be answered by the Georgia U.S. Senate race in January. Never has any local election determined so greatly the direction of the entire nation.

There’s hope for conservatives, however. Even though the cemeteries went strong for Biden, Black and Latino support for the GOP increased. Pollsters again embarrassed themselves. Their power to influence is waning. By 2022 for the off-year Congressional elections, deplorable strength will have increased. In 2024 if the Republican nominee isn’t Trump it will surely be a candidate who espouses Trump’s agenda.

 Re-elected or not in our still undetermined current election, Donald Trump has remade his party and the world. His army of deplorables are by no means down and out.

 

Roger Hines

11/18/20

 

 

 

           

 

                                 Newt Country No More

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/6/20

      

            In 1974 at age 31 an assistant history professor at West Georgia College decided to try his hand at politics. Make that elective politics. The young PhD in modern European history had already been active in teaching political history. He knew the landscape, both ancient and modern, of the Western world and held strong views about what would keep the Western world free and what would not. His run for Congress in 1974 was but a natural, predictable step in realizing his vision for the nation.

            Good teachers are learners. They like to tell others what they have learned. Good teachers are often restless. There’s so much their young charges need to know, and often that knowledge beckons even the teacher to some sort of action. Such was the case, or so it appears, with Professor Gingrich. Teaching alone could not satisfy. If forty years of Democratic rule in the U.S. House of Representatives wasn’t cutting the mustard, it was time to teach via action.

            For Professor Newton Leroy Gingrich, or just Newt as both friends and foes now call him, the foray into elective politics began in 1974 when he ran for Congress against an established Democrat in Georgia’s 6^th district. Newt lost. He lost again in 1976. In 1978 his election to the House began an18-year career in national politics. His backbencher status would ultimately become first tier, given his election to Speaker in 1995.

Brash, smart, and full of ideas about government and governing, Newt took conservatism seriously. From the start he desired and pressed for a Republican party that was aggressive and active. Eschewing the old saw that says the essence of conservatism is restraint, Newt led the Republicans with their Contract for America, a substantial document that promised and attained welfare reform. Falling short of its goal of term limits for Congress, the Contract for America still served as a rallying cry for conservatives and conservative government.

Newt’s stock rose. Orator, author, philosopher, historian, strategist, and an effective political evangelist, Newt Gingrich became a household word in Georgia’s 6^th Congressional district, the state of Georgia, and the nation. The constant simmer between him and Georgia’s House Speaker foretold the day Tom Murphy would be defeated and Democratic control of Georgia would end. Newt’s skirmishes with his predecessor in the U.S. House, Speaker Jim Wright, showed conservatives that Republicans could fight and would fight, no longer content with being a nice, quiet minority. In 1994 Newt was Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

After Newt led the Republican takeover of the House, President Bill Clinton in his January, 1996 State of the Union address acknowledged what had happened. Nearly the political genius Newt was, and knowing he was whipped, Clinton stated, “The era of big government is over.”

Well, we wish. Not only did the era of big government not end. It lingered and continues, else why is the swamp bigger and why does at least half of the nation’s voters support the presidential candidate who called the swamp creatures out?

Alas, why is Newt’s old district of northwest Atlanta/Cobb County turning purple?  Why the fate of Karen Handel, Neil Warren, Mike Boyce, and others? For Cobb County government proper, conservatives cannot deny it was a blue wave. Expect higher property taxes.

There are many different reasons why candidates lose and they are not always ideological. Personality/likeability matters deeply as does single issue voting. Yet, in recent Republican losses in Newt’s old territory something deeper is being revealed. It’s called the sweep of history.

“Now there arose a new king over Egypt who knew not Joseph,” the Exodus account puts it. Joseph, the Jew who had risen to Prime Minister of Egypt, had died. Despite his leadership, and the favor given to Jews, Joseph is now forgotten and the Jews in Egypt are being persecuted.

Newt Gingrich has fought the good fight for conservatism ever since his departure from Washington. But the 35-year-old voter of today was born in 1985. He or she knew not Reagan or Newt unless from personal reading, knowledgeable parents, or an astute American history teacher. Today’s 35-year-old has been brought up with the availability of conservative talk radio, but also with college history teachers, historians, and ubiquitous media stars who invariably bend left and religiously court our youths. “As the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”

Whoever wins the presidential election, Newt, Reagan, and Trump are all still alive. All three esteemed the common man and common sense. If conservatism and the common man are down in 2020, they’re still not out. History sweeps both ways. And freedom lovers will fight another day.

 

Roger Hines

11/4/20

             

 

                                   Is Atlas Shrugging?

               Published in Marietta(GA) Daily Journal, 10/30/20

            Picture, if you will, the Charles Atlas weight building ads that for decades appeared in magazines across America. Charles Atlas was an Italian-American who created and marketed a popular bodybuilding course. Though Atlas’s name was actually Angelo Siciliano, he legally changed it after being told his physique resembled the statue of Atlas, the Greek titan.

            The mythological Atlas, punished for attempting to topple the head god Zeus, was confined to bearing the weight of the world and the heavens on his shoulders for eternity. Hence the statue of the bent but muscular Atlas holding up the world. Hence the commercially inspired pictures of the well-muscled Charles Atlas who taught American men how to get buffed.

            Drawing from the mythological Atlas, novelist Ayn Rand in 1957 authored her 1000-page novel titled Atlas Shrugged. A stern libertarian who unlike most anti-statists was an avowed atheist, Rand came from Russia to the United States in 1926. She became an eloquent opponent of collectivism and the leading literary proponent of capitalism. Rand had reason to reject collectivism. The Bolshevists disrupted her family’s comfortable life and confiscated her father’s business. Her family almost starved under Lenin’s socialism.

            Given academia’s ingrained leftist ideology, we can be sure that few if any universities made Rand’s books required reading. Even so Atlas Shrugged has been rated in several surveys (Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club among them) as the second-most-influential book of all time behind the Bible. The book’s central theme is the evils of tyrannical government.

A child prodigy, Rand understood what was happening in Russia. Enthralled by America’s freedom, bigness, and particularly the skyline of Manhattan, she cried “tears of splendor” upon viewing it. Contrasting America to Russia, Rand became an American citizen and an anti-communist activist.

            There is no Atlas holding up the world, but something or Somebody is. We know that physically the planet we live on is suspended in air, but that awe-inspiring reality is not of great moment in turbulent 2020. Currently we must give our thoughts to more immediate realities such as human civilization, behavior, governance, and keeping tyranny at bay.

            For ages man’s major enemy was tyrants and their tyranny. For centuries man yearned to be free but was everywhere in chains. In ancient Greece glimmers of political freedom appeared, but only glimmers. Actually not until 244 years ago did there emerge on the globe a momentous, radical, and lasting revolution that freed man from kings, queens, princes, dukes, popes and the like. 244 years is not a long time. Chronologically America is still a babe in arms.

            Americans, a freed and self-governing people, sullied their character and defiled their claims of equality when they tolerated slavery and segregation. Those ills, however, were addressed. Americans have since elected and re-elected a Black president. But even the election of a Black citizen to lead the nation has not tempered the anger of domestic, racist terrorists. Crime, particularly vandalism, rioting, and Black on Black murder, is raging. Many political, business, and religious leaders are excusing the rioting. The vandals are justifiably venting, these leaders claim.

            Figuratively, the mythical Atlas is shrugging. He cannot station himself securely and hold us up when free people reject the results of their elections. In 2016 the losers rejected election results, igniting civil unrest. They, not the winner of the presidential election, caused Atlas to shift his feet in order not to fall.

            If political conservatives lose the election next week, they must accept it and sharpen their persuasion skills during the next four years. If they follow the bad example of their liberal counterparts of 2016, incivility will persist. If liberals lose the election next week, they too had better consider the chaos their refusal has caused. To lose and then continue fighting as the loyal opposition is noble. To lose, become a crybaby, and attempt a coup is ruinous.

            The socialism Ayn Rand fled is the socialism that awaits us if Americans elect the wrong person.  Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are totally in the hands of the government. When private producers are destroyed (a la Marx, Lenin and Bernie), free enterprise is destroyed.

  Public schools and Medicare are not socialism. For Karl Marx, socialism was the transactional, interim social state between capitalism and communism, a fact Democrats don’t like to admit. Americans can have it if they wish, but choosing it will negate the courage of the ragtag farmers and small businessmen who only 244 years ago whipped the world’s most powerful empire, thereby giving a new nation constitutional government.

            If America shrugs next Tuesday, the world will shrug also, heading straight back to tyrants and tyranny.

 

Roger Hines

10/28/20     

           

             

 

                                      Is Atlas Shrugging?

              Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/30/20

            Picture, if you will, the Charles Atlas weight building ads that for decades appeared in magazines across America. Charles Atlas was an Italian-American who created and marketed a popular bodybuilding course. Though Atlas’s name was actually Angelo Siciliano, he legally changed it after being told his physique resembled the statue of Atlas, the Greek titan.

            The mythological Atlas, punished for attempting to topple the head god Zeus, was confined to bearing the weight of the world and the heavens on his shoulders for eternity. Hence the statue of the bent but muscular Atlas holding up the world. Hence the commercially inspired pictures of the well-muscled Charles Atlas who taught American men how to get buffed.

            Drawing from the mythological Atlas, novelist Ayn Rand in 1957 authored her 1000-page novel titled Atlas Shrugged. A stern libertarian who unlike most anti-statists was an avowed atheist, Rand came from Russia to the United States in 1926. She became an eloquent opponent of collectivism and the leading literary proponent of capitalism. Rand had reason to reject collectivism. The Bolshevists disrupted her family’s comfortable life and confiscated her father’s business. Her family almost starved under Lenin’s socialism.

            Given academia’s ingrained leftist ideology, we can be sure that few if any universities made Rand’s books required reading. Even so Atlas Shrugged has been rated in several surveys (Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club among them) as the second-most-influential book of all time behind the Bible. The book’s central theme is the evils of tyrannical government.

A child prodigy, Rand understood what was happening in Russia. Enthralled by America’s freedom, bigness, and particularly the skyline of Manhattan, she cried “tears of splendor” upon viewing it. Contrasting America to Russia, Rand became an American citizen and an anti-communist activist.

            There is no Atlas holding up the world, but something or Somebody is. We know that physically the planet we live on is suspended in air, but that awe-inspiring reality is not of great moment in turbulent 2020. Currently we must give our thoughts to more immediate realities such as human civilization, behavior, governance, and keeping tyranny at bay.

            For ages man’s major enemy was tyrants and their tyranny. For centuries man yearned to be free but was everywhere in chains. In ancient Greece glimmers of political freedom appeared, but only glimmers. Actually not until 244 years ago did there emerge on the globe a momentous, radical, and lasting revolution that freed man from kings, queens, princes, dukes, popes and the like. 244 years is not a long time. Chronologically America is still a babe in arms.

            Americans, a freed and self-governing people, sullied their character and defiled their claims of equality when they tolerated slavery and segregation. Those ills, however, were addressed. Americans have since elected and re-elected a Black president. But even the election of a Black citizen to lead the nation has not tempered the anger of domestic, racist terrorists. Crime, particularly vandalism, rioting, and Black on Black murder, is raging. Many political, business, and religious leaders are excusing the rioting. The vandals are justifiably venting, these leaders claim.

            Figuratively, the mythical Atlas is shrugging. He cannot station himself securely and hold us up when free people reject the results of their elections. In 2016 the losers rejected election results, igniting civil unrest. They, not the winner of the presidential election, caused Atlas to shift his feet in order not to fall.

            If political conservatives lose the election next week, they must accept it and sharpen their persuasion skills during the next four years. If they follow the bad example of their liberal counterparts of 2016, incivility will persist. If liberals lose the election next week, they too had better consider the chaos their refusal has caused. To lose and then continue fighting as the loyal opposition is noble. To lose, become a crybaby, and attempt a coup is ruinous.

            The socialism Ayn Rand fled is the socialism that awaits us if Americans elect the wrong person.  Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are totally in the hands of the government. When private producers are destroyed (a la Marx, Lenin and Bernie), free enterprise is destroyed.

  Public schools and Medicare are not socialism. For Karl Marx, socialism was the transactional, interim social state between capitalism and communism, a fact Democrats don’t like to admit. Americans can have it if they wish, but choosing it will negate the courage of the ragtag farmers and small businessmen who only 244 years ago whipped the world’s most powerful empire, thereby giving a new nation constitutional government.

            If America shrugs next Tuesday, the world will shrug also, heading straight back to tyrants and tyranny.

 

Roger Hines

10/28/20