Lunacy, Thy Name is Corporate America

 

Lunacy, Thy Name is Corporate America

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) April 29, 2023

How odd that corporations, whose chief purpose has historically been to gain more customers in order to make more money, have turned their attention to social goals.  They’re telling employees and customers what they should believe about every social issue of the day.  As though Big Brother weren’t increasing his tyranny daily, primarily via his unelected, regulation-loving bureaucrats, Corporate America has become his lackey. Examples abound.

            Transgenderism? Embrace it, you lowly, unenlightened customers who have made us the big corporations we are today. Forget biology. Male and female is an ancient social construct that has outlived its usefulness. If you shop in our stores you may use the bathroom of your choice. If you’re what we formerly called a male and wish to be considered what we formerly called a female, assert yourself and go apply to play on any sports team that tickles your fancy. Throw off the idea that there are innate physical differences between so-called males and females. Don’t let today’s conservative bigots deny you your happiness. Big Sports will support you all the way, as will most members of the National Chamber of Commerce, though not necessarily your local chapter. Don’t worry about those Republicans. We detached from them sometime back. They talk too much about local control and Mom and Pop businesses.       

            Equity? Embrace it also. The goal at our corporations is to treat all people fairly. Yes, we want your business, but for you and all the other middle class folks who have made us great we desire equal social outcomes. Join us as we attempt to make America equitable again. One of our goals is equal numbers of Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Others among our employees.

            The LGBTQ Lobby? Look, we love all the children of the world. “Red and Yellow, Black and White, they are precious in our sight.” Remember this ditty from long ago? Well, we apply it to sexuality and marriage. We need to drop the time-worn belief that men shouldn’t marry men and women shouldn’t marry women. Accept the fact that all of those traditional views of human sexuality are so yesterday. We’ve accepted the modern view. With glee.

            Free speech? Ok, we believe in free speech, but anything can be carried too far. Consider the deserved plight of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. This guy was rightly fired for disinformation, misinformation, and whatever else it’s being called. Right after his last show he gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation and made references to prayer, knowing quite well that there are many people in America who don’t believe in prayer. Carlson, the creator of the most watched cable news show ever, is a bigot through and through as are the millions who watched him. We know that many of our customers love Carlson, but we still believe that he “does not appeal to our better nature,” if we may use one of our tired liberal lines.

            Higher Ed?  Yes, we corporates have given our fair share to our universities. How could we not? After all, they have been faithful, just as corporations have to be, in promoting and protecting their “brands.”  Universities are smart. They understand that to recruit students they must spark things up a bit with palatial buildings and resort-facility dorms. Gotta hand it to conservative state legislators, though. They’re right when they claim that universities spend too much money on branding and too little on educating their students. However, just as we like for customers to stay with us, so do universities like for students to stay with them for five, sometimes even six years, to finish a four-year degree. But hey, we corporates need higher ed just as we need the media.

            Oh yeah, the media? Look, we own the media, and in more ways than one. I mean, you’ve heard of Disney’s ABC News Network? That’s a corporation. Fox News? That’s the world wide Fox Corporation. Oh, there are smaller networks but we rule the roost when it comes to news and entertainment, Mr. Carlson notwithstanding.

            Our sincerity? Well, the wokest of us all, CVS, has put it best in its “Guidelines for Supporting a Colleague who is Transitioning.” CVS is out there ahead of all of us. I know, seems weird that a place where you get your medicine would lecture employees about “proper pronouns,” but their customers either don’t know of their wokeness or don’t care.

At any rate, join us in changing America. She’s merely one of many nations in which we do business, but we need her still.

 

College Kids, Country Folks, Venison, and … Revival?

 

College Kids, Country Folks, Venison, and … Revival?

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) April 22, 2023

            This past weekend my wife and I returned to Mississippi for a family reunion. Of the seventeen children in my family, ten are still living. Seven of those are sisters, five of whom could not get to the reunion because of either bad health or distance. That means that only five of “us kids” were there but we five were blessed to be in company with boocoodles of nieces and nephews.

            Truth is I was as excited about another matter as I was about seeing my family members. I was determined to go far out into the country on Sunday morning, even further out from where we grew up, to attend the ongoing revival occurring at now-not-so-little Salem Baptist Church near Lake, Mississippi. But first, what’s going on at Salem has a context. A big part of that context is Wilmore, Kentucky and Georgia.

            As the world knows by now, for sixteen days in Wilmore at Asbury University an around- the- clock prayer meeting and songfest occurred. On February 8 around 20 students lingered after a chapel service at Asbury and continued praying and singing. As some of the students trickled back to their dorms and classrooms and told their roommates and classmates about the extended service, more students headed to Hughes Auditorium. There was no highlighted speaker, there had been no announcement of a prayer meeting, and there was actually no designated leadership for the praying and singing. There were no physical healing miracles, no dark room with beaming lights, no sense of a production, and very little noise except  spontaneous praying, singing, and quiet communicating among the Asbury students. Within seven days 50,000 students from around the country had joined them. Asbury professors and university staff members ventured in as well to participate in the worship.

            Departing worshippers would describe the happening as “a strange peace,” and “the presence of God.”

            Among evangelical denominations, the word “revival,” which is not mentioned in the Bible, is often used to refer to renewal, to an outpouring of God’s Holy Spirit, and in the case of non-Christians, to their coming to Christ in repentance and faith. There were no efforts by Asbury University to publicize this revival. Tucker Carlson and other news outlets were asked not to come when they contacted Asbury, and Carlson respectfully honored Asbury’s wishes though he covered the story. Groups with American flags were asked to leave their flags in their cars since “the service is about Christ, not America.”

            For the last few years spiritual revivals have been occurring in rural Georgia as well, though different from Asbury. In Millen, Cassville, and in Little Chicago, an area in Columbus, hundreds have publically professed their Christian faith. In Omega, a town with under 2000 people, some 400 men gathered at Bethel Baptist Church in February for a Beast Feast (deer, elk, etc.) After a testimony by outdoor television show host Chuck McAlister, 41 men publicly announced their newfound faith in Christ. In Blackshear, Georgia in January at a venison supper (what is it about meat?) 19 men announced their recent faith and 28 re-dedicated their lives to serving Christ.  

            Not all such happenings at colleges or churches have been Baptist. Lee University in Tennessee where an Asbury-like revival has occurred is associated with the Church of God. In Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and throughout the Midwest nondenominational churches and Wesleyan Methodist churches are also reporting growth via new believers recently converted. The myth of the dying church may be just that.   

            As for Salem Baptist in Mississippi, it also is experiencing a visitation of joy, peace, and revival. The pastor of 29 years, Rev. Larry Duncan, is a family friend. No church could be more rural, yet more than 400 worshippers from a 30-mile radius are packing the pews every Sunday. Baptisms are occurring regularly, meaning that people are publicly professing their faith in Christ.

            No doubt this rural spiritual awakening has its detractors. I can only attest that at Salem the joy is real, the Bible is preached, the pastor/preacher is the humblest of men, and the church is positively impacting a large rural area.

            What my wife, our grown children and I observed and experienced at Salem is what can fill the emptiness of college students and cure the fatherlessness-caused crime that besets our cities and is reaching rural areas as well. In an age of crime, fear, and broken families, transcendence is the need of the hour. So claimed the prophets, the Apostles, Martin Luther, the Wesley brothers, many a Catholic bishop, Billy Graham, and others.  And so claims Pastor Larry Duncan.  

             To God be the glory!

 

How Fares American Culture?

 

 How Fares American Culture?

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) April 15, 2023 

            If my house were burning down I would care not one whit about the race, the social status, the educational level, or the personality of neighbors and firemen who were rushing to lend help. My only interest would be saving my family and my house. My only sentiment would be gratitude for those who cared enough to help stop the destruction.

            Like never before America is afire. Literally so only two summers ago as Defund the Police mayors of major cities ignored arsonists and looters as well as their victims, and figuratively so today as competing ideologies continue to collide. If and when 2024 arrives I’ll give my vote to the firefighter who can best extinguish the fire, defeat the social arsonists, and bring us back to normalcy.

            The 2020 electorate was almost evenly divided on who should be president. Since the 2022 midterm election brought neither a red nor a blue wave, it appears that 2024 might be a repeat of 2020. It’s certainly clear that America’s culture war is not over. Religious freedom is an issue, what with churches being bossed around by the government during Covid. Freedom of speech, like never before, has risen to issue level. Unabated crime now reaches to suburbs and rural America. Indoctrination in schools has rightly riled parents in many states.

            Moral issues are not dead. Letters to the editor around the country have centered on pervasive foul language, the licensciousness of the Super Bowl halftime show, and the moral turpitude of candidates. ESPN, Disney-owned, has come under fire for sprinkling its sports coverage with progressive politics as has Disney World for celebrating, loudly, LGBTQ culture. Customers and stockholders are beginning to speak out and criticize the previously untouchable corporate CEOs who take sides with practically anything the LGBTQ lobby proposes.  Americans, typically far more pragmatic than they are ideological, have begun to see the importance and the necessity of speaking out for the sake of their children. How presidential candidates respond to these concerns will definitely affect the 2024 outcome simply because Middle America is becoming more independent and no longer willing to be a dispossessed class of people.

            Since Democrats always stick together and Republicans seldom do, the 2024 presidential election will hinge largely on how well Republicans unite after choosing their nominee. It is no shame that Republicans don’t always stick together. Rather it is a testimony to their independence and rejection of group think. How many Democrats are willing to take a position against abortion? How many Democrats would stand strong against Nancy Pelosi in the way that The Twenty stood against and achieved concessions from Speaker to Be, Kevin McCarthy?

            One seldom hears a Democrat calling fellow Democrats “deranged disruptors,” yet those were Newt Gingrich’s words for The Twenty who kept McCarthy honest. Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw called them “terrorists,” and Fox News host Brian Kilmede dubbed them “idiots.” Interestingly, all three of these Republicans have either apologized or acknowledged they used overblown words. Most conservatives understand the gravity of the 2024 election and the necessity of unity and the right fireman.

            If unity comes it will be because paleo-conservatives and neo-conservatives see the light and are willing to march together to it. Paleo-conservatives are traditionalists like Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan who stubbornly hold to the old verities of individualism, capitalism and localism. Neo-conservatives like Asa Hutchison and Mitt Romney are more willing to concede than to fight for conservative values. Paleos understand that radical forces are determined to reframe and reset America, both her economics and her social and religious values. Neo-cons either don’t realize this or are complicit. Neo-cons are embarrassed and enraged by Jim Jordan, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson, but Middle America isn’t.

            Such is the landscape as things warm up for 2024. As things go today, the state has become the domineering partner in our nation’s culture. The Biden administration desires to tell us what kind of cars we can and cannot drive and how we should view sexuality. Market forces no longer drive the culture. There is certainly no market discipline on schools as teachers’ unions rule the roost in our major cities.

            Political comic P.J. O’Roark stated, “Winners don’t reach across the aisle. They fix borders and lay down terms of surrender.” This sad truth rubs those who believe in bipartisanship, but bipartisanship doesn’t work when one side is trying to set fire to our institutions and turn the culture upside down. What will work is a confident leader/fireman who believes in the American experience, who views America as exceptional, who can inspire Middle America, and who will effectively dispose of America’s social arsonists.

The Die is Cast

 

The Die is Cast

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) April 8, 2023

            When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg turned a misdemeanor into a felony and ignored the statute of limitations, he put a match to a rich knot of pine. The fire hasn’t flamed up yet but it isn’t about to be doused.

            With the indictment of former President Trump, Bragg set in motion the Old World and eastern world system of persecution politics. He unwisely placed his personal animus for Trump before his concern for the country and the law. We can forget about the good old days of Republican President Reagan schmoozing with Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil or the dynamic duo of Jefferson and Madison. We can now expect Central America and Southeast Asia-style weaponization of law and political chaos. The chaos is building now, mainly because Trump’s case is being intentionally prolonged to interfere with the 2024 election and because today’s GOP is not the GOP of McCain and Romney. The party now has a coterie of fighters.

             Senator Schumer contributed to our persecution politics. Remember? “I want to tell you, Justices Cavanaugh and Gorsuch, you have unleashed a whirlwind and you will pay the price,” all because the two justices were pro-life. But did CNN and MSNBC play up Schumer’s flame throwing?

            Through a great civil strife, two world wars, a great depression, and conflicts abroad that took the lives of sons, husbands, and fathers, America has come. However, our still young nation now stands to lose its status as the free-est nation ever and as the strongest economic and military power in the world. Just as importantly and even more fundamentally, it is poised to lose its famed freedom of speech and its celebrated peaceful transfer of power. Television can lie, but what it’s showing us now about the treatment of almost 50% of the voters in the 2020 presidential election is no lie. It’s happening before our eyes. Donald Trump alone is not at issue. The 2020 50% is at issue as well.

            It’s not difficult to see how and why our present strife began. The chief reason is that liberals became illiberal. Until a decade ago, one could assert that the essence of liberalism was tolerance and the essence of conservatism was restraint. But liberals are no longer tolerant. Restraint is still the essence of conservatism. In fact conservatives are too restrained and always have been. We delight in restraining government and bad influences on our children, but we are not given to protests, emotional outbursts, and shameless misbehavior as liberals are. We are good at restraining our emotions. Because the die has been cast, this is about to change.

            Liberals, who never saw a protest rally, a parade, a microphone, or a camera they did not love, used to be truly liberal which is to say broadminded and accepting of different ideas. They were actually too broadminded, defining all things broadly, stretching definitions to the point of meaninglessness (think gender), and admirably being the strongest defenders of freedom of speech. It’s their unthinkable abandonment of freedom of speech that has created universities that deny platforms to conservative speakers, corporations that are run by “We are the world” internationalists, military leaders who wobble when asked about wokeness in the military, and unambiguous plans to destroy a presidential candidate they don’t like.

            Liberalism’s abandonment of free speech and of free expression generally has brought us to a dangerous point. Liberals no longer see differences of opinion as opportunity for debate. They have successfully convinced social media platforms to silence conservative opinions. Anything liberals disagree with is now dubbed “disinformation,” for instance the conservative belief that there are distinct scientific differences between men and women. Classical liberalism, along with New England pulpits, ended slavery, but classical liberalism is dead. It has been replaced with leftist efforts to silence all opposition.

            All of the above has led to the current indictment of a former president. Who seriously thinks that Alvin Bragg was acting alone and does not have the support of the entire political left? Today’s liberals, namely Democrats and their reliable media friends, intend to destroy Republicans, not just Trump. If Donald Trump is convicted, I suspect conservatives will shed a great deal of their restraint. Joe Lunchbox, Bill Plumber, and Bob Carpenter long ago surpassed the inaction of conservative elites and they have the numbers to make a difference.

            It was primarily ragtag farmers and very small businessmen who whipped the British. It will be their modern counterparts, not intellectuals, who turn us back to liberty and free speech. America is truly at a crossroads. The law has been weaponized. The time for resistance is now.

 

Say What? A New Temperance on the Rise?

 

Say What? A New Temperance on the Rise?

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) April 1, 2023

            We all know that alcohol is deadly, that it kills dreams, reputations, families, and careers, as well as over 140,000 Americans every year. We might not know or realize that Americans, unlike the Mediterranean World and elsewhere, are downright mindless when it comes to alcohol. Or so my Italian sister-in-law observed when she first witnessed the drunken Saturday night drag racing on the road in front of our house, heard about bootleggers, and learned that many of the community’s best citizens fled every weekend to the closest county that wasn’t dry.

            “A-med-i-cans no understand. They no be smart about drinking,” Antonia mused one Monday morning after we all learned of the weekend alcohol-related accident down the road that killed a young woman and left a 17-year-old male mangled for life.

            But Americans gotta have their booze. It actually wasn’t until the early 19^th century that citizens began to be concerned about the effects of alcohol consumption. Under the leadership of pastors, community leaders, and especially women, Americans were made aware of alcohol’s devastation. Yes, alcohol was responsible for much of the crime back then too, as well as for ruined individual lives and ravaged families. So much so that drinkers were urged to “temper” their drinking. Thus began “temperance work” or “the Temperance Movement.”

            Christianity Today, a leading evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham, reports that throughout the 19^th century, in spite of high class social drinking and “the raucous saloon culture of the American west,” temperance work and prohibition appealed to “a broad swath of society.” Its reporting must have been accurate, given the fact that in 1919 Congress passed the 18^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors.

            The Roaring 20’s ignored the 18^th Amendment and reduced that broad swath for sure, assisted by the rising tide of Hollywood culture and the German families who brought Pabst and Anheuser to our shores. Despite the efforts of Protestant Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and the Temperance Movement in general, the 18^th Amendment was repealed by the 21^st in 1933. Since then, in regard to liquor, it has been Katie bar the door. Today teenagers still consider their first alcoholic drink the rite of initiation into adulthood. This obviously doesn’t bother brewery owners. It must excite them since they’re building breweries at every crossroads in the land. It doesn’t bother too many sipping community and political leaders either, even though they know quite well that drinking leads to destructive scenes like the one mentioned above by which my Italian sister-in-law was shocked.

            But hold on to your seats. Timothy Carney, senior columnist for the Washington Examiner, argues that a new temperance is afoot. He asserts that the devil’s brew is next in line for cancellation. What he further states will warm the hearts of all teetotalers and of adults who have lost a teen to Friday night drinking. Twitter, Carney says, is filled with promises never to drink again. Vox, the journal frequented by leftist millennials, has run articles on the value of prohibition and the evils of alcohol. Teetotaling, chortles Carney, is once again in vogue.

            I rejoiced to learn of Carney’s prophetic words, and although I have read that nonalcoholic beers are increasing and that booze-free pubs are cropping up, even in D.C., I still figured Carney was too optimistic. Then who should appear on Tucker Carlson Tonight but the affable Joe Germanotta, the father of Lady Gaga Herself. Proudly and happily proclaiming his personal victory over alcohol, “Mr. G.” explained how he is successfully decreasing the amount of alcohol in drinks at his restaurant and how he no longer likes the taste of it. “I feel tremendous and no longer drink rivers of Scotch,” Germanotta declared. A Catholic, he could have passed for a committed Baptist.

            Even so, today we are still the United States of Corn, Barley, Grapes, Spring Break, “Happy Hour,” Feel Good, and Good Taste. But the taste is often that of dependency, embarrassment, and ruin. State Representatives, School Superintendents, Judges, and ordinary folks have been embarrassed because of this fact. Tempering actually doesn’t always work. The temper-er is still tied securely to his or her social lubricant and to the damnable and damning curse of what we call status symbol.

            I choose to take some hope from Carney’s reporting and Mr. G.’s conversion. But given our history, that hope is limited because even though alcohol is more than twice as deadly as guns, Americans gotta have their booze. God help us.

Cultural Cleansing Resumes

 

Cultural Cleansing Resumes

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) March 25, 2023

            In my home atop a bookshelf stand two small flags beside each other. One is Old Glory; the other is the Confederate Cross. I treasure both.

            My grandfather and great-grandfather lived under the Confederate flag. My father was born only 29 years after the so-called Civil War ended. A civil war it truly wasn’t. Most history books and dictionaries define a civil war as one in which two sides within a nation are vying for control of the government. Such was not the case in America from 1861-1865. As Jefferson Davis himself put it, “We do not wish to take control of America’s government or its Capital city. We only desire to be left alone. What a free man joins he has the right to un-join.”

            It’s hard to argue with Davis’ last point. Why, though, after a century and a half, would a columnist bring up a war that settled decisively not whether or not the South had a right to secede, but whether or not the South was able to continue its efforts to secede. The South was not and lost the war.  Call it what you will, this war, like all other major wars of the world, still haunts us. Why? Because the past is not over yet and never will be. Shakespeare said it best, “What’s past is prologue.”

            An effort in the Georgia House of Representatives to continue the war and to cleanse Georgians of their past has been named House Bill 794. If made law 794 would remove Stone Mt. Park’s official designation as a Confederate memorial.

            The expression “to memorialize” means to speak, write, or build something that will help people remember something, but Democrat state representatives Mary Margaret Oliver,  Omari Crawford, and Billy Mitchell, want us to forget something. Defending the bill, Oliver stated that 794 is needed “to cease our honoring the Confederacy and adhering to a lost cause.”  Crawford claims that “honoring any Confederate history hinders diversity and is inconsistent with Dekalb County’s present-day values.” Mitchell echoed, “We have been waiting too long for action by the Stone Mt. Memorial Authority to act on needed change to the false history of the park and the Confederate carving.”

            False history? Were the three men carved in stone – reluctant secessionist Jefferson Davis, the much respected Robert E. Lee, and Christian statesman Stonewall Jackson – not truly three of the most prominent Confederate figures? Thirteen other Democrat House members have co-sponsored 794, meaning that at least 16 state representatives believe there are certain things about the past that Georgians should not remember.

            Cleansers / erasers of our culture have been toppling statues they don’t like for decades. Paused by Covid, they are now back at it. They are sanctimonious. If you like what they don’t like, you are evil. If you support anything about the Confederacy, you’re a racist. My question is how do the erasers like those named above know my heart or the heart of any Georgians? How could a white man who honors Confederate memorials as I do volunteer to teach at an all black school in order to help get integration underway?

            There also stands in my home a picture which I treasure much more than I treasure the Confederate flag. It is the picture of my unforgettable colleagues at George Washington Carver Junior High School with whom I taught in 1967-68 in Meridian, Mississippi. Representative Oliver and company must think I’m bipolar. If I am, then so were Robert E. Lee and William Faulkner. Lee loved the Union, but when asked by Lincoln to command the Union forces he declined, stating that he could not fight against the people of Virginia. Faulkner, honored around the world for his writing, answered “Yes, of course” when asked if he would have fought for Mississippi during the Civil War. Typically one likes to defend his own people and region, but that doesn’t mean one approves of everything said or done in his own region.

            Self-appointed cleansers should cease judging people by the color of their skin. Rev. Al Sharpton, a sympathizer of the cleansers, should correct his unforgiving spirit, as so many blacks have, and act more like Martin Luther King. I wish that haters of memorials believed in freedom of expression.

            I also wish that cleansers could have known my Carver Junior High principal who once said to me, “If we should learn anything from history, it’s that ‘what the world needs now is love, sweet love’.” Principal Sykes and I both loved the song that Dionne Warwick would later record. Principal Sykes would not have favored the erasing of history.  

The Rugged Life and the Managerial Elites

The Rugged Life and the Managerial Elites

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) March18, 2023

The house my wife grew up in was built in the late1800s. It stands in middle Tennessee in rural Rutherford County, 30 miles southeast of Nashville. The first time I courted Nancy at her parents’ home I was struck by its beautiful simplicity, its Gone With the Wind-style staircase, and the two red brick chimneys at each end of the structure.

            Rolling into the driveway I instantly began to compare the house to the three different tenant houses where I grew up. I began to wonder if Nancy had leveled with me when she said her family was country folks like mine. They were. I eventually learned that like my father, Nancy’s father kept their “place” clean and presentable. Rakes, hoes, and tools were in a certain location. Firewood was stacked neatly. The front porch was always swept clean. Inside, and most like my father, newspapers and Bibles would be placed here and mail would be placed there.

            But time changes almost everything. Today the Milligan place appears not so well kept. Its front yard, still beautiful and welcoming, is deceiving. The barn is caving in, and the back yard is filled with junk. The country road that the house faces takes a 90-degree turn north along the side of the house, making junk car parts, appliances, and old furniture fully visible.

            And what is the judgmental attitude that I and so many others are so wrongly prone to take when we see junk? I say we presume that junk owners have no aesthetic sense and are probably uneducated. Deplorable conditions, we assume, are caused by deplorable people.

            Not so with the current occupants of Nancy’s home place, for in the very back of the junky back yard stands a large enclosed shed filled with canned food, clothes, paper towels, diapers, and old refinished furniture. It’s all organized and is clearly no small operation. Its name is “Helping Hands.” The occupants, a retired mail carrier and his wife, built and stocked the shed in order to lend assistance to nearby needy families. The back yard is actually the prepping place for some of the items in the shed. The junk yard owners are neither junky nor needy. Nor are they deplorable.

            Today around the world there is a growing schism between working people of the middle and lower class and the professionally well established managerial elites. How did this schism ever develop in America, given the fact that our nation owes its existence to the most rugged and risk-taking people the world has ever known?  On the surface our schism appears to be one of urban and rural, but it is actually one of values and beliefs versus the outlook that allows no limit to the words nation and place. Nations are passé. The world is our oyster.

            Americans convinced their youth that they should go to college and they did. Consequently the average age of generally well-paid plumbers is 60. Economically and militarily America is still chairman of the board – for how long is a different matter – but as for “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one), we are divided. “Diversity,” which sounds so appealing, has led to the opposite of what its contenders wished, placing one’s skin color and class above one’s willingness to work and achieve. For all practical purposes Martin Luther King’s words have been abandoned.

            We’ve all heard of the “revolt of the masses” and have usually championed their aims. Today we’re experiencing the “revolt of the  elites,” meaning those whose outlook is global, whose houses and boats await them around the world, and who for the sake of profit, disdain borders as well as those who believe in borders. Formerly believers in free speech, they now label as disinformation the perspective of middle class working stiffs who disagree with them.

            As for morals there is today no shame. Only prudes care what their children see on the Super Bowl halftime show or at the elementary school’s drag queen show. As for the three philosophical pillars of modern education – Marx, Darwin, and Freud – two were atheists and one claimed theism one day and atheism the next.

            Our modern temper holds contempt for place and native homes. The ever-quotable Churchill remarked, “We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.” Country singer Miranda Lambert sings, “The House that Built Me.”  I’d like to invite four or five of our nation’s chief globalists and political elites to take a ride with me and visit those rugged, self-dependent, selfless, junky middle class angels who occupy Nancy’s childhood home. It might convince them that such local angels, not globalists/internationalists/elitists, are the salt of the earth.

 

The Capture of America’s Culture

 

The Capture of America’s Culture

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) March 11, 2023

            More and more so-called progressives (I prefer “leftists”) are increasing their grip on America’s institutions. The institutions of marriage, the family, the university, religion, human sexuality for heaven’s sake, free enterprise, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are particularly targeted by progressives. Why is there not more outcry? Several organizations are fighting the onslaught. Even a few celebrities and professional athletes have awakened to it. Some pulpits are addressing it but most are not. Hence, progressive ideology and policies are foisted on our children.

            Perhaps the most unsuspecting and therefore the most neglected force that is removing traditional values from the culture is public schools. I hasten to exempt Cobb County Schools from my charges of educational craziness. Cobb schools are not going crazy with drag queens, Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, or any other leftist endearments as long as board members Chastain, Wheeler, Banks, and Scamihorn are there. Atlanta and Forsyth County schools? Who can be sure?

            Overall though, public education long ago adopted a tendentious view of the purpose of schools, of American history, and of the chief characteristics of America itself. Leftists rule in so many local and state boards of education that resistance is difficult. Except for the leadership tenure of William Bennett and Betsy Devos, the federal – and constitutionally illegal – Department of Education has been run by leftists since Jimmy Carter succumbed to the National Education Association and gave it Cabinet status. Since then the claims of systemic racism, white privilege, and what I call sexual chaos have been embraced by many school systems.

             One of the least talked about influences on public schools, one that citizens often miss is that of powerful teacher unions. I have a background of resisting that influence. In 1975 I wrote my first letter to the editor, the editor of this newspaper in fact. The letter was an effort to inform MDJ readers of what was happening with teacher organizations in Georgia. The one of which I was a member, the Georgia Association of Educators, was taking a turn that I believed was not good.

            That turn was called unification. For years state associations like GAE could affiliate with the National Education Association (NEA) but teachers could join their state association without joining NEA. Unification meant that if you joined a state association you automatically joined the national organization. Call it forced “unity.” Because of what NEA stood for (collective bargaining, teacher strikes, teacher-only membership), I chose not to join. My letter argued that professional organizations are a good thing until they steer off their appointed path. I rued the fact that I no longer had a professional organization through which to contribute to fellow teachers.

            A few days after the letter was published I received a call from Fred Rainey, a man I did not know. Fred was a Smyrna, GA resident and a teacher in Atlanta. His first comment was “You must not know about PAGE” (Professional Association of GA Educators). He informed me that a small group of Atlanta and Dekalb County teachers were forming a new organization in response to unification. Right away I joined the 75 or so teachers. Times were hard or the group would never have asked me to be the editor of their publication, PAGE ONE. I was an English major, not a journalism major, and knew nothing about editing anything except high school and college essays. But with the help of PAGE members who contributed articles and with the blessing of a small living room floor, my wife and I spread and arranged news and opinion pieces on the floor, trying to get them into some kind of order that Star Printing in Acworth could make sense of.

            The 1976 issues of PAGE ONE were humble and sparse compared to today’s glitzy but substantive issues. But PAGE didn’t have over 90,000 members then as it does today. The joy of it all is that the majority of Georgia teachers then as now opposed the grip that teacher unions have on education. They oppose organizations that pit teachers against principals, superintendents, and board members and foster adversarial relationships instead of the team concept that schools badly need.

            Today teacher unions contribute over $50 million annually to the Democrat party. Thus the craziness seeping down from super-sized school districts like New York, LA, and Chicago to smaller systems throughout the country, craziness that considers schools more foundational than family, equity more important than mathematics, and localism a relic of the past.  

            Schools are the foremost perpetuators of culture. What they teach and allow is what our culture will be. Parents and non-parents alike best take note. The culture itself is at stake.

Globalism or Globaloney?

 Globalism or Globaloney?

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) March 4, 2023

            Globalism is a fairly simple study. Merriam-Webster dubs it the practice of considering the entire world as one’s sphere of operations. Economically globalism refers to free trade plus any other international agreements that lead to benefits for all participant nations. This sounds reasonable enough. Some nations have cotton; other nations have oil. All nations need clothes and all need fuel, so deals are made.

            Somehow over the centuries globalism became complex. Though Queen Isabella and Columbus are sometimes called the world’s first globalists, ancient nations dealt with each other and explored the potential of international economies long before 1492. Globalism’s long path has led to good things and bad, some of the bad things being politically contemptible and morally reprehensible.

            Think about it. Who are the biggest promoters of globalism currently? America’s globalists are typically super wealthy men who prefer to be called internationalists and who seemingly have meager if any devotion to the land of their birth and their raising. Typically their sympathizers are intellectuals, liberal professors, and college students who have been fed the globalist message and have swallowed it whole. Generally they eschew such mottos as “America First” and grow ill at chants of “USA! USA!”

            Talk about “fly-overs”! Literally and figuratively globalist activists fly over us as they go from nation to nation, palace to palace, board room to board room and conference to conference to preach their gospel. They are quick to take with them an older child or teenager who is prodigiously well-spoken and can thunder like a Billy Graham or a William Jennings Bryan. Their child star of the moment is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish protestor and provocateur who doubles as a devout globalist and a climate change agent. This young lady who no doubt has the gift of eloquence can screw up her face and swish her hand in the air at adults as effectively as an old-fashioned schoolmarm coming down on her third graders.

            Anyone who reads newspapers regularly knows who the fly-over ideologues are. The most famous is Al Gore, Jr. The younger Gore (my dear deceased Tennessee father-in-law and mother-in-law championed his senator father) was raised in Tennessee but is as much Tennessee as I am Vermont. His message is still that the end is near. Like the politicians who clamor for open borders and sanctuary cities yet live in gated communities, Gore, Jr. flies privately hither and yon to tell his audiences that emissions from airplanes must cease. Globalism, thy name is hypocrisy. Having dropped the cry of global warming, as have all the full time environmentalists, Gore has broadened his sermon title to climate change. While climate change is his focus, globalism is his broader context.

            There are definitely certain benefits of globalism. Nations need to talk with each other just as neighbors do. They need each other’s products. But its negative aspects cannot be denied. For the most part globalism has hurt the little man. Globalism allows the USA to sell its goods to Mexico, Europe, and China but it can and does hurt small local businesses. How can a Mom and Pop hamburger joint compete with transnational McDonald’s? For Americans globalism means loss of jobs when corporations move jobs to low cost countries. Cheap labor that produces an ongoing underclass doesn’t seem to bother the highly paid corporate globalists who consider the entire globe their orbit. What do CEOs care about East Palestine, Ohio or Coldwater, Kansas or Fitzgerald, Georgia?

            Globalism isn’t just about economics. It’s about socio-politics, culture, and values as well. Are we to fault the world’s little people or its middle class who fear losing their ability to keep their souls, to view their own land and culture as special, to cherish their language, and to pass on to their children certain values that other nations do not hold to? Have America’s globalist-elites not noticed that free trade with China has not led to democracy in China but has led to China’s ownership of property in America?

            Globalism has led to shuttered American factories, to downward pressure on the wages of unskilled laborers, and to outsourcing. It has diminished the virtue of citizenship. After all, “We are the world. We are the people.” As beautiful as that song is, its message has been faultily applied.   

            John Lennon’s song, “Imagine,” may be the most beautiful song ever written. Its words, “Imagine there’s no countries,” are both haunting and wistful. I for one also long for a world with no borders, but I have to remember that right now that’s not possible and that it was the Almighty Himself who confused our language and spread us out and about in the first place.

Desecration’s Path

 Desecration’s Path

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Feb. 25, 2023

            In his notable biography of Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, Timothy Colton describes Yeltsin’s boyhood, accentuating the poverty, police brutality, and other hardships that Yeltsin’s family endured at the hands of the Communist Party. When Yeltsin’s father was arrested and imprisoned for “anti-communist agitation,” Yeltsin, his mother and younger siblings experienced grinding poverty. It is little wonder that after edging his way into politics, serving in many administrative positions and eventually being invited to join the administration of Mikhail Gorbechev, Yeltsin commenced to do everything he could to dissolve the communist system. Colton points out that Yeltsin was driven by memories of what communism’s labor camps had done to his family and to all other Russian families, particularly those in the Urals where Yeltsin grew up.

            One might ask just what has been the lasting effect of government, whether totalitarian or democratic, on the family? In totalitarian nations, the answer is clear. The village rules. Its chieftains, whether in the jungle or in industrialized advanced nations such as China and Russia, run the show, even, as in China, telling families how many children they can have. In democratic nations the appearance is that the family is an honored institution, but drip, drip, drip has been the historical reality of anti-family policy even in Western Europe and America. The family is being desecrated.

             To desecrate is to profane, to mistreat, or to diminish anything that is viewed as having high purpose. Desecration typically regards principles, institutions, or symbols that have served as honored landmarks in a given culture. Freedom of speech and obedience to parents are principles. The family, the school, the church, and the law are institutions. Flags and in many cases buildings are symbols. But which of these is the most foundational? Which came first? Which is the most influential toward a child, no matter what kind of government his or her family lives under?

            The family preceded the tribe. It comprised a little unit of government that preceded the village. For purposes probably practical and beneficial, villages united to form governmental territories. Territories merged to become societal entities called states or nations. All the while except perhaps in America the village and its chieftains or the great nation and its emperor became the focus of attention. Rendering unto Caesar became onerous. Government policies such as taxation and regulation of every stripe undermined the family. Enter, even in supposed democracies, the nanny state.

            It is reported that former president Jimmy Carter is approaching death. We should wish him and his family well. As careful students of our own governance we might want to recall that it was Carter’s Conference on the Families in 1977 that opened the door to the re-defining of family. Ostensibly held “to discuss ideas for family policy” and to garner the support of conservatives, particularly Catholics, the three-session conference became a brawl. With gay rights activists and feminists in attendance, the goal soon became “to decide what constitutes a legitimate family.” Ever since the Carter presidency the word family, like male and female, has been in flux.

            No matter what the crazy left wants or likes, no matter if “Heather has two mommies,” every person on the planet has a mother and a father. Is this fact alone not enough to indicate, yea prove, what a child needs and was intended by nature and nature’s God to have? With a president leading the way in every facet of our sexual chaos (gay marriage, transgenderism, etc.), with many public schools and practically all universities joining in on the chorus, and with pro sports and corporations lending unabated support, it should be easy to see where this path of desecration has led. It has led to “Think as I think or you are abominably wicked; you are a toad,” as Stephen Crane put it in his shortest poem. It has led to the desecration of family and marriage, to the village (the government) offering to take care of our babies within months after they are born, and to dependency. It has also led to tyranny fostered by the elites of academia, sports, and corporatism.

            Russia is still ruled by a brute, but Yelsin, as president of Russia, made life much better for that part of the world that has had a sordid history. As for Stephen Crane, he ended his 5-line poem with the words, “”I will then be a toad.” 

            When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who paid with his life for opposing Hitler, came to America in 1939, he stated in a letter to a friend, “There is no theology here. Christians have become an accommodating lot.” Maybe Americans of all faiths should ponder Bonheoffer lest the desecration continue.

 

Several Sins of Syntax

Several Sins of Syntax      

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Feb., 11, 2013              

            So … the latest language fad is to begin conversation or the answering of a question with the word “so.” Listen for it on television. If a television reporter shoves a microphone into the face of a pedestrian and asks a question, or if a news anchor asks his or her guests a question, eight times out of ten the interviewees will begin their answer with the word “so.”

            Boys and girls, “so” is a conjunction. It’s a word that joins two thoughts or facts to each other and they must be joined in the middle, so … put “so” in the middle as I just did. Maybe the following example will help: Hines’ columns are good for insomnia, so I often find myself reading them at 3:00 AM. One more thing, in case taking words apart helps: a “junction” or “juncture” is a place of meeting. “Con” means brought together. Ah ha! This means that when subjects and verbs, or ham and eggs, or mice and men come together, they are conjoined. If this helps any at all, locate your long ago high school English teacher and tell him or her that you have mastered the conjunction. You and he or she will be conjoined in mutual joy.

            If guilty, don’t be too hard on yourself. Unlike mathematics, language is an inexact science. There are no eternal verities that govern language, no angels in the sky who weep when we abuse our native tongue. Language is like dress. It is social adaptation. We put it on and we take it off. Just be sure to put on the right language before going to the big interview you’ve been wanting.  And please, don’t worry too much about language errors at the supper table. On second thought, give at least a little thought to supper table talk. I suspect the dearth of family conversation is one cause of the decline in clear, straightforward communication. Screens, addictive cell phones, and lack of family conversation have sadly diminished language skills, leading to grunts and utterances instead of meaningful discourse. Books, newspapers, magazines and genuine conversation can improve our communication skills. Quick social media interaction cannot.

            On to other sins of syntax. Syntax, of course, means placing words together in such a way as to produce logical thought. Tell me, though, what’s logical about the expression “centers around”? That’s another goodie now used by everybody and his brother. “Centers around.” Say it again and then try to picture it. No, don’t try because it can’t be done. We can “center on” something but not around it. I hate to use the prissy word, oxymoron, but that’s exactly what “centers around” is, an expression that is self-contradictory. Compare it to Romeo’s last words to Juliet: “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Sweet sorrow?  Or consider “act natural,” “only choice,” and “old news.”

            Well, those last ones are ingrained; we will never stop using them, but since “centers around” constitutes rebellion against geometric truth, someone start a therapy group for those who desire release from their habit.

            But let’s get serious. Sometimes syntax is intentionally warped in order to influence or control. Definitions and names are altered for the same reason. Associated Press provides a good example. In its Style Guide, AP no longer allows the words “pregnancy center” or “pregnancy resource center.”  “Anti-abortion centers” is the proper vernacular. Also “pro-life” must be “anti-abortion.” According to the Style Guide, the word “abortionist” must be avoided since “it connotes a person who performs clandestine abortions.” The Guide also forbids the term “”fetal heartbeat bill,” claiming the term is overly broad and misleading.”

            I have a daughter-in-law who has had extensive experience with pregnancy centers. Anna would tell you that the centers are equally concerned with the life of unborn babies and the general welfare of the mothers. AP, of course, doesn’t believe this.

            Not all the Guide’s verbal obfuscations are recent. In 2017 the following appeared: “Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex or gender. Avoid references to both sexes in order to encompass all people.” I ask, was Sarah Huckaby Sanders not accurate in her response to President Biden’s bizarre and supposed state of the nation address when she declared that the political left has become outright “crazy”? Men can become women and women can become men? Such rebellion against nature is craziness and the President’s speech abetted it.

            Wherever he lies buried, George Orwell … well, we know where Orwell, a former leftist, stood on newspeak. And he was right. Language, twisted and obfuscated, is the chief weapon of tyrants.