2009-17 GEORGETOWN

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Mea culpa. Maybe.

Chrysler’s sale to Fiat is accomplished in record time in part through a redefinition of bankruptcy law that has stood for some 200 years. My President promised, and I doubted, dazzling velocity in navigating a process that historically has required many months and even years. Illustrative of the unprecedented stroke the White House currently wields, unparalleled speed ensued, and even a plea to the Supreme Court (albeit that it fell fortuitously to its most liberal member) could not derail the freight train of Obama destiny. Of course those standing on the tracks as the train barreled past got mowed down, but what’s a little carnage in the name of progress.

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A reader has questioned my use of the term “my President” and occasionally “our President.” Well, he is! The terminology is in part a rejoinder to the throngs of the past who petulantly proclaimed “Bush is not my President.” That only works if you void and mail in your Passport to the Department of State. Remember the hordes who vowed to emigrate to Canada in 2004? I saw neither a mass exodus then nor a rush to return four years later.

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Good leftists have a talent for never letting a tragedy pass unexploited. Left wing BLOGS are aflutter with cries of right wing hate, after the Holocaust Museum shooting and the murder of Robert Tiller. Right wing hate crimes? Certainly they exist. Similar acts of violence on the left? Yeah, they subsist as well. Remember Lee Harvey Oswald? Recall the ELF and PETA slash and burn tactics to further their “causes?”

A continuing theme of this BLOG has been that those on either side of the political spectrum who believe they have cornered the market on decency and morality, and conversely those on the other have a monopoly on hate and violence, perpetuate a cruel hoax and provide useful data on how their synapses fire.

Of course Hollywood does this every day to the delight of the far left. Frank Burns, the bumbling MASH surgeon, Rose Nylan, the dipsy mid-Western Golden Girl, and of course, Archie Bunker, Republicans all. While liberals Hawkeye, Maude, the West Wing guy, proliferate and prosper. Just Hollywood’s way of using the appellation to proclaim someone to be insensitive, morally repulsive, or genetically deficient. How easy to mark someone as a dolt (or worse) simply by applying a label.

Academia is not far behind. Recall the Duke University philosophy professor when asked why there are not more conservatives in the profession, responded that they lack the intellectual capacity to engage in such eclectic endeavors. And when was the last time you heard of a left-wing speaker being pummeled with fruit and driven from the podium at one of our citadels of “free and open discussion?” Happens to conservatives with regularity.

Now if this leads to a self-satisfied smirk and a poke in the ribs of your far left cohorts – “see, I knew it was true,” then you join a robust band of those who also believe(d) in the superiority of one culture over others. Those folks in Germany who were convinced of the inferiority of the Jews, racists in the American south and elsewhere who treated people of color as chattel, homophobes everywhere who label gay men as limp-wristed pansies and Lesbians as testosterone-laden tomboys. There are vivid descriptions for those who harbor such beliefs.

Paranoid, you say? Perhaps. But name one Hollywood hero of the last quarter century portrayed on the screen or tube as a proud conservative? John Wayne is out of fashion. You might point to the Terminator or the idiot Steven Segal, but movie moguls fashion them as brutish, knuckle-dragging trogs, all the more mockable by the sophisticated Chardonnay set.

Leftists are simply so unfailingly convinced of their superiority that they cannot fathom alternate philosophies and beliefs. The closed mind is a terrible thing to let roam loose.

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During the Campaign, McCain advisor Senator Phil Graham made a seminal statement to the effect that America and American’s were not as bad off as they made it seem, and suggested in most un-PC terms that they “stop whining.” He was beset with anguished wails “oh how can you be so cruel when the country and its citizenry are in such pain.” Personally I thought he made sense. While there was (and remains) suffering for sure, on a relative scale it was either exceedingly moderate or our threshold of acceptance dipped lower than the Dow Jones average.

No, I am not going into competition with Oprah, but I do offer a novel for the exercise of measuring our pain against that of contemporaries. The Monkey House by John Fullerton, a journalist who reported the Bosnian war from Sarajevo, paints a stark but realistic picture of the siege of that city. Read it and tell me if you believe any American would trade their pain for that experienced in this once glorious city of the former Yugoslavia.

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I’m not a fan of the slippery slope theory. When the NRA suggests that taking members’ AK-47s is but a precursor to feel-good liberals confiscating children’s BB guns, I have difficulty connecting the dots. When liberals vow that 12-year old girls should have unobstructed right to abortion without parents’ consent lest this precious “human right!” begin to crumble, I am similarly flummoxed. But piercing (not piercing commentary, but body piercing), which for decades was confined to ears (a benign practice yet one I fail to comprehend) has now expanded to eyelashes, navels, tongues (ugh), not to mention body parts that were once considered private and unassailable to the needle.

Establishing one’s unique identity is often put forth as a rationale for such bizarre behavior. I don’t recall ever feeling the need to so self-identify (at least not in such extreme fashion) and that may explain some of the deficiencies under which I struggle.

But piercing?

Early on I had a bad experience with a needle at the hands of a rural doctor (or so I was told; I don’t recall seeing a diploma on the wall). And that may account for the aversion. But why anyone would voluntarily stick a bolt through their tongue or mangle a body part designed for suckling infants is, I’m afraid, a practice that no matter how I try, I can neither fathom nor justify. Fogey though I be, I am not in favor of breaking skin for pleasure.

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Both Atlantic and Pacific Basins remain tranquil, but the response trade is rumbling awake, and I am receiving inquiries as to my quickness (as opposed to my deadness) and availability if and when…
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