Saul Alinsky


The Malevolent Underbelly of Protest

Protest is at least as old as social interaction. Protest occurs in third world countries stricken with poverty as well as more economically prosperous countries waxing toward revolution.

We are not unaware.

Protest is, of course, much easier in nations that are free. That begs the question: What nation is free? We used to think ours was. Some still do. But increasing government intervention is eroding our freedom every day. At least we can still gather, rally, and protest. Or can we?

We have reasons to protest.

The ever increasing size of government is one of them. We understand that government must grow. As population grows so must some government staffs to process and accommodate a larger population. We understand fully that is not the cause of our protest. We protest the unnecessary and unreasonable expansion of government. Taxes increase. We understand that as well, but we protest unnecessary and unreasonable tax. The list goes on.

But the real protest, the current “movement” of protest, runs much deeper.

The current grassroots movement is awakening to much more than taxes. It is beginning to understand that there is deepening assault on our core, cultural values. The list of Czars and their backgrounds help with that understanding. The present regime glares at us with distaste, at the Constitution with disregard, and at the traditional values and culture we endear with disdain. The political machine seems to be a nation unto itself with little regard for its citizens. We protest the assault on our cultural values.

Is that true only of Politicians? No. There is a generation of our citizens who have grown up on the ideas expounded by the liberal progressive movement. They have embraced the left, seduced by its autonomy and the ability it gives them to act irresponsibly, to see the personal benefits and soft soap of relativism, and to allow the government to take care of all their needs. It, as well, leads to the decay of productivity, endorses a behavior of sloth, betrays the free market system, and promotes a social decay that will lead to national collapse.

It also embraces multiculturalism, the variety that is destroying Europe. And with it, the sovereignty of property is threatened.

And so, the silent majority, the majority of Americans (?), begins to perk up its ears, to assemble, and to protest.

That begs the question: How do we protest? Better put: How do we most effectively protest? There are some who protest openly, straight forwardly, and unabashedly. Ms. Malkin is a conservative columnist and blogger who is committed to her point of view, pulls no punches, and speaks candidly and openly. Her form of protest is an approach that has reached millions and led to Americans being better informed of the issues, and I dare say spurred to action to protest. Does the left not do the same in opposition to conservatives? Read MoveOn.org, KOS, and other left wing blogs.

But there is a much more covert, underhanded, and malevolent form of protest.

Some Tea Party groups are beginning to entertain, even use, the tactics supplied in the writings of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky disliked the left and the young anti-war radicals of the 60’s. He tried to help the poor and those he deemed ravaged by corporations, forgotten by the government, and whose enclaves could not fight their way to success and prosperity.

Alinsky was a communist of sorts. He spent his life as an organizer for what he saw as the underprivileged, and he is famous for his books Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. In these books he laid out a list of rules by which the Community Organizer could disrupt the establishment, the opposition, and the status quo. He is reminiscent of Marx. But can one strip from it his communist ideology and embrace the so called neutrality of his tactics?

During the anti-Vietnam-War movement, many young radical activists began to use Alinsky’s rules. Alinsky was not particularly happy about this development, but it persisted. His rules seem benign enough at first glance. He tells people to fight within the system. But he also decries the notion of allowing morals to get in the way. His theme revolves around morals being situational to the struggle. And is it not?

Yet, his rules seem benign enough and strike people as perfectly logical. Why not? Fight fire with fire, right? And within the system. But the underbelly of Alinsky’s construct and most of those using his tactics were driven to be socialists, irreligious, underhanded, immoral, and downright fraudulent in order to accomplish their goals. In the end, they became ruthlessly relativistic, embracing the contradictions of Marx.

Be careful about being fooled by what appears to be benign rhetoric.

Alinsky followers believe that the ends justify the means, period. Many make the argument that what is important in life is “taking the high ground” at any cost. All else be damned. Whatever must be done, shall. Alinsky, whether intentional or not, spawned sociopathism bordering on psychopathism, following in the footsteps of Hitler, Gehring, Marx, Pol Pot, and others of their ilk. Do you want to be associated with their tactics?

Sociopathism is an antisocial behavior suggesting one who is unconcerned about the adverse consequences for others of one's actions. A psychopath is a person with a personality disorder indicated by a pattern of lying, exploitiveness, heedlessness, arrogance, and lack of empathy and remorse. Does that strike a chord about our own government?

These are the same tactics that brought people to spit on us as we debarked the plane from Southeast Asia in1969, exactly 40 years ago, while others called us baby killers. It is the same logic being applied to try our Navy Seals, to try the planner of the WTC bombing in civil court, and to judge every move our troops make as they are monitored by the media. And they are blatantly exhibited by Alinsky’s twisted social construct and, hence, his tactics wrought by ideology. The people who assaulted me were indoctrinated and led by these so called “Community Organizers.” One could not separate one’s despicable tactics from one’s ideology.

Alinsky’s were a set of tactics based on his ideology.

The fact is: tactics are themselves ideological in concept and cannot, by definition, be neutral. Tactics are a subset of, and driven by, goals. And strategy is based on, and driven by, the goals of ideology. While that is necessary, it, as well, requires an understanding of ideology, and ideology is used to subvert it. Hitler’s goals embraced the ideology of a pure Aryan race and drove him in attempting to eradicate an entire ethnic group. His tactic to throw them into the ovens obviously appeared moral to him. And what better way to reduce the bulk of some 6 million people? There is another way to put the destructive effects on followers of Alinsky’s tactics :

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

In other words, if you are willing to take the path and use the tactics that spawned sociopaths, you may inadvertently become one of them. Remember that one of the traditional attributes of America is that, opposed to the opinion of our President, KOS, MoveOn.org and the Young Turks, we are and have been a Judeo/Christian culture. If you do not support Judeo/Christian values, what do you support? Is the communist ideology of Saul Alinsky that of the majority of Americans? It certainly is the ideology of those we oppose.

I remember the tactics of Jerry Rubin, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Alan Ginsberg, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and their ilk. Is it not ironic to realize that their protest during the 60’s created the very problems that we find ourselves up against today? And not only that, but to realize that the leaders of today came from that group: the neo, ultra left, youth movements.

One must take careful note of the effective social change they created. They became grotesque forms of malcontent in the hands of people who believe any means are justified by the vision of an end, and morality is something that gets in the way. The acts of Jane Fonda and Bill Ayers are testimony to misunderstanding the rules of Alinsky … or are they?

The work of Michelle Malkin is a case of straight up criticism. She ferrets out the facts and lays them on the table for everyone to see. Her rhetoric is plain, easy to understand, and not couched in the terms so often used by the new socialist statists. It is not newspeak nor duckspeak, but an honest presentation of the facts and an opinion about them. And with that, she has acted as a magnet to pull people into the movement. Why must we resort to the tactics of a known social, communist agitator the likes of Saul Alinsky? We must, however, remember who trained under him: President Obama, Hilary Clinton, his czars, and a great many of his supporters.

I say, let there be truth and light, not subversion and darkness. If we can get more people to research what is going on, we can make our voice heard at the polls and kick the new social engineers (sociopaths) out!

How do you think Obama, Reid, and Pelosi got elected? By tactics devoid of ideology?

There has got to be a better way. While denial is certainly not the way, are we sure that the tactics of Alinsky and Marx, scrubbed of communism and radical activism, are?

Dancing in the Jungle

When I was a young man, I stated some obscure, seeming truth to my cousin, something I don’t even remember. But the outcome of that brief encounter stayed with me the rest of my life. I had a thought that I believed was not only true but profound. He asked me to explain. I could not. He then told me that what I could not explain I did not fully understand and thus did not know.

I have pondered that seemingly pejorative declaration the past 50 years of my life. But I have come to realize that what he said is not necessarily true. I have come to believe that feeling is sometimes a form of knowledge as yet not fully defined.

The weight of this paradox returned when I used my phase, Dancing in the Jungle. A friend asked me on several occasions to explain what I meant. I could not define it to my friend’s satisfaction. Did that mean, once again, that I did not understand it either and thus did not know it?

The answer is more complex than it seems. Reading Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death has begun to posit answers that I could not put into words what I felt and knew: That I had come to terms with the duality of an active mind captured in a rotting, decaying, dying body.

I know what I need because I am instinctively drawn to it. I did what I did otherwise because I once feared the consequence of my being.

When I say I am finally at peace with that duality, I offend people. I assume it is because they are not, because they find it impossible, and because I am just a common man. I offered a book to my wife and told her I thought she ought to read it. When she did not, I asked her why. She said the author has no background. Who is he, she asked? What is his authority?

And so it goes. Without credentials, the thoughts of the common man are without merit. They are not considered worthy of consideration, of challenge, or even worthy of criticism. Yet Ernest Becker states that this terrible duality affects everyone: statist, elitist, scholar, or jughead.

The Jungle is an environmental condition found in parts of Southeast Asia and other places in the world. It is often thought of as foreboding, foreign, and filled with strange things that go bump in the night. It conjures up the idea of darkness and things closing in on you. But euphemistically, it can be used to invoke what humanity is faced with: The utter helplessness of their being. Fraught with the terror of its finality, they protect themselves with myths, lies, and barriers against its inevitability.

The problem is that man reasons within his situation. Although driven by instinct, he is aware of his past and his present, and, if normal, acts on his awareness accordingly. Thus, his instinct does not always win out in his effort to dismiss and disguise what his mind sees as being outside his dying body.

I no longer find myself out of my “self” (schizophrenic) nor overwhelmed by my “self” (depressed). I have no apparent reason to believe in God. I do not cry for everlasting life or salvation. I do not obsess with a feeling that accountability faces evil people in some “here after” life. I believe that reason is a human survival attribute like the claws of a lion. I find a great deal of purpose in life but no meaning. The purpose, of course, is to procreate, nourish one’s young, and shelter and feed them until they are on their own, and then die. All else is filler. That is different in my account than meaning. Meaning by my definition invokes a vision of more than life and purpose.

Dancing is often thought of in the context of joy. One raises his head to the sky and rejoices in affirmation of art and pleasure and contentment. One is no longer plagued by the dichotomy of dualism. For one to sit on the toilet and defecate while listening to the music of Bach symbolizes perfectly the dualism of both the best and the worst of being human. One is either destroyed by this realization or dances when finally coming to terms with the meaninglessness and finality of ones existence amid this duality.

Dancing in the Jungle, then, expresses one’s finally coming to terms with being-in-himself, yet being-beyond-himself. My mind soars as my flesh rots. But I dance in the face of it, in the jungle of human suffering and contradictions and lies and myths that allow us to exist within our own private madness.

People devour the bible, strive for salvation, labor for everlasting life, and pray for a certain mercy that expunges their cognitive aberrations. Christians, Jews, and Muslim’s alike cling, white knuckled, to their bibles. For in them lay the answers to all their questions. Ask a biblical scholar a question, and he will immediately seek out the passage in scripture that answers it. Though the answer might be vague, if not downright incoherent, it is so because it is the word of the lord. And in the breast of each lays a heart that secretly opines: My God can kick your God’s ass.

I did not join the military to defend my God but to defend yours. You would ask if it is not mistaken to act as the agent of something that is wrong headed, for it seems it could as well justify defending the worst in man. Yet it is a matter of practicality. Of all the myths and lies and wrong headedness and mystery of man, America’s the most benign. I would have it for my children. Its values and its culture are what I want for them. It is not a matter of right and wrong to me but one of what it is not.

Dancing in the Jungle is the realization of facing man’s impotence while rejoicing in his reality, his art, his accomplishments, and the fact that though man is mad, though his flesh slowly rots, though he is myth and lies and fear and trembling, he is man alone in the jungle yet free in his discovery that he can at last relent his being.

He is silhouetted on a mountain top against a darkening sky, turning and dancing in his aloneness. Lonely on that mountain top; but worse, his inner soul grasps his aloneness, the space he fills where nothing enters in, where nothing else resides. He feels it creeping under his skin as he faces death.

The ancient Jews believed in what they call basheet, that in modern times seems to have been reduced to bershet. In the Jewish community today, it is defined as something that was meant to be. But the ancients thought of it differently. They believed that there are only so many spirits waiting to be processed, so to speak. There are two thoughts: one holds that each male spirit was paired with a female spirit prior to gaining flesh. The other holds that one spirit was split in two, one female and the other male. They belong to each other and are only parted if one or both do something against God’s will. This a comforting thought in that it relieves one from the torturous realization that one is forever “an aloneness.” And to the thoughtful couple, as he enters her, they become one in flesh and in spirit. Was it their way of overcoming their “aloneness?”

Dancing in the Jungle is a metaphor for the release of my personal madness, the madness of hoping to escape my inevitable death, of not confronting it, and of the thought of my flesh rotting and with it my mind’s eye closing …forever.

But in the interim I shall continue to wage a battle with my pen, a battle to keep the traditions and values of America alive for those who follow me. I will try to render man’s madness a will to survive the onslaught of progressive ideology. For it is just another myth, a myth that captivates the unwary, that seduces man into believing that he is beyond helping himself, that he is stupid and common and impotent, and that, finally, the elitist, the statist, and the progressive scholar shall govern his life.

The statist as well as the liberal progressive scholar despises me. For I have found my way. I am at peace with it, and I am, at long last, Dancing in the Jungle.

Flounders Field

Ernest Becker, author The Denial of Death

Whereas Freud explained the motivations and neuroses of human nature to unconscious instinctual drives, Becker and Rank see man’s problems based on his basic split between his limited body and his limitless mind. This basic dualism is a universal form that can be seen throughout history in all works. Sartre’s being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Descartes’s division between mind and body, etc.

Socrates once mused that philosophy is practicing the art of dying. So, Becker would write, “…to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.” Becker believed that each of us carries a “vital lie”, that which gives our life meaning, and we would do anything to protect that lie. Becker’s hope was that by becoming conscious of the vital lies that we live by, we could by some degree be free from them. We, as a society, could choose better vital lies to live by such as the principles of freedom, truth, and peace. Ultimately, Becker wrote that the fullest achievement of man was his self-transformation, submission to being the creature that he is. We are neither animal nor god, only human. He understood religion in this light, as the presence of a transcendent that we submit our individuality for something greater than ourselves.

Cement House Cemetery, near Langemark in Flanders. Burial of three unknown soldiers, November 2005 (pictured at the top).

A cold November morning in Flanders fields where between the crosses, row on row, fresh graves wait. It is burial day. A few times a year corpses and parts of corpses, recently found, are given back to the earth.

Here, at Cement House Cemetery near the village of Langemark, the day starts with the burial of three unknown soldiers, whose remains were found by the Boesinghe Diggers in an industrial zone near the canal at nearby Boesinghe.

These Boesinghe Diggers are Flemish archeology amateurs, all fascinated by the Great War, all devoted to dig up as much as possible, while it still can. The industrial zone is expanding and the diggers excavate sites where modern factories will soon be built.

In 1915 the whole area near the canal at Boesinghe was a battlefield, Patrick explains. He is one of the Boesinghe Diggers. Every Saturday he and his friends dig up the former trenches. They use old trenchmaps to locate Nomansland and the frontlines.

The Idea of Death

It is incumbent on any intellectual consideration of death to also intellectualize life. Is it true that one must have lived to say that one is now dead? Pre-spiritual advocates might ponder that seemingly absurd question. It has become controversial in medical and religious circles to define what death really entails. One example of life seems to center around consciousness. But that is only a human attribute. For example, plants are assumed to be alive, but consciousness is not a part of their life-hood.

Some species of living organisms, hydra for example, seem to be immortal. Others such as one celled organisms are alive but do not exhibit any attributes of the rest of living organisms. While parts of more complex organisms may not appear to be alive, other parts of that organism do.

An almost universal human idea of life holds that life as we know it is simply a transient state between that of living protoplasm and that of spirit. That is, life will continue in some form after death. Is that superstition or fact? It might be either, but it is certainly improvable.

The idea of everlasting death is repugnant to all humans. In fact, one’s own death is the most terrifying thought a human being can entertain. Yet the religious zealot embraces life’s temporal status only as a bridge to a more sought after form upon his death. I am a hunter, and while hunting one day with religious friends, I asked if the antelope we were about to kill would go to heaven. The answer I got was yes, as would ants, bees, and all living creatures. I wondered if the antelope might take offense to our efforts to end his life when that fellow finally joined him. While such a view seems absurd to me, the truth of such things is unknown. Antelope have no comprehension of death. Likewise, they have no real idea of life, but they do have a powerful urge to sustain it.

To most civilized societies, the place and time of one’s death remains unknown. And it is programmed within the general, human consciousness to not ponder such an eventuality. Yet, to some, the religious implications of death are so manifestly welcome that they embrace it. To wit: terrorist suicide bombers. Britain’s MI5 has intelligence information that Islamic surgeons trained in England have migrated to some Middle Eastern countries and are now implanting bombs in women’s breasts.

On the flip side of the coin, an American soldier goes into battle with the thought that there is at least some small chance that he will survive. The unlucky fellow beside him will meet his fate, but not him. Yet we all know that our day will come. We are not immortal, at least not terrestrially so. We do not know when or how, but we do know that our day will come.

“This is man’s paradox” writes Becker: His body is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to the fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out in nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

As Pascal states “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” To which Becker explains “ Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness – agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.”

I am familiar with death, as are we all. As a soldier I saw it. There was also a time in my life when I worked on a terminal ward of a military hospital. All who resided there knew that death was upon them, and that it lay only days or weeks ahead. All were young. Observing their response to it was undeniably tortuous. If, rather when, they pondered their demise, I would frequently have to inject thorazine to calm them. And why? Because to the human mind, the idea of death is one of such finality that it cannot be dealt with rationally. Life’s “vital lie” was at an end for them. The repression and denial of death could no longer sustain them.

While animals do not consider the idea of death from a standpoint of ratiocination, they do have a strong survival instinct. As a hunter, I have observed their reactions to the threat of death hundreds of times. Their will to live is extraordinary.

There is an amusing saying that you should not take life too seriously since you will never get out of it alive anyway. And yet people continue to struggle with concepts, dreams, and the determination to further goals they perceive as either beneficial to themselves, to their children, or to society as a whole.

The world is filled with such people and their activist movements, all mundane to their individual existence it would seem. Throughout history such ambitions have been examined and individuals have risen to power or prominence because of it. Yet the great equalizer is death. Hitler or Mother Teresa is no worse or better than I in the final analysis.

Is it then true that we should not struggle for a cause in the midst of knowing our own demise? If you knew you had only 30 days to live, what would be your response? Let me pose this question: Let us assume that you believe the direction that Obama, his corrupt administration, and his activist, communist czars are taking this country would affect not only you but all your progeny in an extremely detrimental way. What would be your response? Would you find it more important to spend “quality” time with your loved ones and get your affairs in order, or to make an even more gallant attempt at stopping the outrageous actions of a Marxist regime in the making that would affect your offspring for the remainder of their lives?

The Elasticity of Nouns. The Plasticity of Death.

Such words as communism, terrorism, fascism, et al are elastic. That is, they expand or contract within the ideology of their own definition and the individual defining them. They seem to have a memory of their own state of equilibrium in social engineering and gravitate to that constant state. Yet death is anything but elastic. It is indeed plastic. Once that state of life is altered by death, it will not return to its normal state. Thus, we often ponder apples against oranges in our effort to understand our position and worth in the universe.

Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death, points to how humans repress the idea of death. It seems to me that he is stating another case of denial, a frequent and impotent social aspect of most Americans. Yet it is the very definition of America that has given men and women the courage to face death.

We speak of the death of an American in his struggle to defend it. But we seldom speak of the death of America itself. Some would say that America is elastic and that it will return to its normal state of cultural and traditional values, and, further, that the conservative Tea Party movement, made loud enough, is the current method by which that will be accomplished. Some say no, that the America they knew and grew up in has become plastic, and that our once great culture is beyond changing, manipulating, or saving. It has no memory.

Can we extrapolate or correlate the repression of one’s own death to the repression by Americans of its death as well? Or is it a matter of one’s own outlook? The ultra-left embraces the current efforts to change American values. But can we, in all consciousness, continue to call our nation America or fly the stars and stripes over a land that is headed for the grave? Do we revolutionize consciousness?

I was astonished and surprised when my 4 year old granddaughter began to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the dinner table recently. She recited it perfectly.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".

It is noteworthy to understand the origins of some of those words. The word republic, for example, underscores the government the founders invoked. The words under God, insisted on by Eisenhower during the cold war, gives the nation a stated religious character, and the words liberty and justice for all seems self evident. Yet, today, all these words are under attack. My four year old granddaughter has no understanding of either that or the powerful implications of the words she recites, nor does she understand death. It strikes me that neither do many Americans. But it most certainly does to those activists interested in the death of America.

Like the animals I have hunted, where is that extraordinary will of America to live? Is it apathy, complacency, laziness, or an abject tolerance to their surroundings no matter its heated advances toward destruction? No, Americans will continue with their comfortable lives until their bellies are empty. They will continue their denial, their repression of their own deaths, until it is upon them. And then we will see the sleeping giant awaken. The injection of thorazine will not calm their panic nor their will to survive. Will it be too damned late?

Is Becker’s and Pascal’s madness theme that of American citizens, that they have a project immortality that keeps them in denial about the death of their own country? And when will their “vital lie” about the decay of America be cast aside and they rise up to rescue it? Again, not until their bellies are empty.

Professor Francis Harry Compton Crick was a British physicist, molecular biologist and neuroscientist, most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. Crick suggests in his The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul that a person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atom, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them. He argued that traditional conceptualizations of the soul as a non-material being must be replaced by the materialistic understanding of how the brain produces mind; that religions can be wrong about scientific matters, and that part of what science does is to confront the errors that exist within religious traditions.


Beyond Good and Evil

Even the most elementary understanding of science makes it clear that human perception is a construct. The blue of the sky, the deep red of a morning sunrise, the human voice, even the glass of water you drink, none are as they appear. Francis Crick describes the brain as a conscious, perceptive, and thinking organ. Yet what you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there. Your brain makes the best interpretation it can, combines the information, and settles on the most plausible interpretation. This allows the brain to guess a complete picture.

Envision an experiment. Two people are shown an identical, large, and intricate painting, each being in different rooms. The two people are not aware of each other. The first is told to look at the picture for one minute. The second person is confronted with the same picture, but it has been covered with sixty, one inch square pieces of paper so the painting cannot be seen. As the second person watches, each square is removed for one second and then replaced. This continues until each square of paper has been removed and then replaced. The person only saw one inch of the painting at a time. You then ask each person what the picture was of and to describe it in detail. Both have seen the entire picture. But each will have a different interpretation. The second person might not know what the picture was, but might be better able to describe certain pieces of detailed information. It is somewhat analogous to one not being able to see the trees for the forest, the other not being able to see the forest for the trees.

It becomes evident then that you can be taught to see, hear, smell, and feel what others want you to see, hear, smell, and feel in an effort to make their construct yours. This has myriad implications. One, of course, is the modern move to secular morality vs. tradition morality. Europe has become almost wholly secular; some other countries are following, and America is making great strides toward the notion of a self-evident morality as well.

Philosopher Bryan Magee says that “human behavior makes the most sense when it is explained in terms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts and grams.” To him, we understand ourselves not so much through science but through our interrelations, our culture, our value systems, and possibly our totems as described by Emile Durkheim. And we differentiate ourselves by these attributes over those of plants or animals.

My “unified continuum”, however, is constructed of past and present experience as well as my expectations of the future. We are made up of atoms and molecules, but they move at our will in a holistic way.

One can speculate whether morality is an illusion. That we “ought” implies that we “can”, which implies, at least, a certain amount of free will. Yet, is morality a construct as well? Kant showed us that the material world is not the only world there is, and that there is a higher domain we rely on in every free choice we make. That “there is a ghost in the machine, which we may for convenience term the soul.”

To an extent these are micro observations of humanity. But there is as well a macro behavior. As atoms and molecules move in a continuum that describes each of us as “I”, we as a people move as well to describe the continuum of a society whose culture was at least partially static.

What is good and evil, and what is beyond either? Our culture has been lead by the rule of law and by the conditions of morality as set in stone in the Ten Commandments. These written rules have presided over morality for much of Western civilization for centuries and for America for the better part of two hundred years. This is swiftly becoming an extinct description. A new morality is being taught and nurtured, particularly among our youth, many of whom are now adults.

The rules that governed our individual behavior and that of society are no longer in vogue. The new morality is being claimed by the secular ethic of the future. “The culture wars in America, involving issues like abortion, divorce, and homosexual marriage, can be largely understood as a clash between traditional morality and secular morality.”

“The new source of morality is no longer the external code but the inner heart.” Does this not provide cover for autonomy and self-fulfillment; does this not provide cover for selfish and irresponsible behavior?

The neo and ultra left are deeply imbued with this new morality. It has taken over American government, our universities, our corporations, and our institutions. It is beyond traditional morality. And it is beyond good and evil. It is the appeal of unbelief. It is gaining the power to remake society in its own construct.

Our brain tries to unravel the consequences of what appears to be the ever decreasing value of the dollar, spiraling unemployment, the apparent corruption within the government and corporate America, and our own tenuous situation amidst a left wing enclave of secular morality. As the forest around us begins to burn, our philosophical musings begin to seem less important than does the simple idea of survival.

As a nation we are certainly spiraling downward. Has this any real meaning in the overall scheme of things? We might abhor the idea of our savings being sacrificed to the hungry politicos; we might shudder at the idea of being simply another third world country; we might even suffer a suicidal depression at the thought of the abject poverty of our children. If we listen to the positive lectures by such evangelists as Joel Osteen, we might even find a silver lining in our own demise. If we are only beings whose perception cannot even perceive the real “us”, do those sacrificed in the ovens of Buchenwald make any real difference?

Are these simply the perceptions of Francis Crick with which our minds make the best interpretation? Is morality simply a construct of one’s own personality and inner feeling, or is there something more about a social contract that one must hold on to? Why is the sky blue? Why is Obama making changes that threaten our quality of life?

Life can be made easy or difficult. Is our morality that of Job wherein mankind simply does not have enough knowledge to explain why things happen the way they do? Do life’s hardships chisel a perception of morality?

As a practical matter we are obliged to forgo these elevated intellectual matters and fight simply for our survival and as well that of a society and culture that is not beyond good and evil, but rejoices in the rules by which it was forged. Fight with tooth and clay for the survival of our traditional cultural morality, if not for yourself, then for your children and their children.

If you revel in exploring “self”, you must also explore the consequences that self indulgence brings to what was once a glorious nation, whose prosperity and culture was the envy of the world. For what other reason did everyone want to move here and virtually no reasonable person wanted to leave?

Force Majeure is not a defense to denial.

Doctor L. Scott Smith, Esq.

“Etiquette, no matter how well-meaning, cannot manipulate the marketplace of ideas for long. To argue otherwise demonstrates merely the idiocy of “political correctness””. L. Scott Smith, America Unraveling, A Politically Incorrect Analysis of Public Faith and Culture

Political Correctness: A Cultural Cancer

Cancer is not just one disease but a large group of almost one hundred diseases. Its two main characteristics are uncontrolled growth of the cells in the human body and the ability of these cells to migrate from the original site and spread to distant sites. If the spread is not controlled, cancer can result in death.

The term Politically Correct has some rather vague beginnings, some of which did not often represent what it does today. Kant’s separation of “faith” and “empirical knowledge”, for example, argues that the former is a subjective matter only. Does that make Kant the father of relativism? Nor is the ideology of Political Correctness just an American phenomenon. It aspires to undermine several Western cultures as well. Oddly enough, it is currently thought by liberals to be a brilliant Republican invention to undermine the opposition. Whatever its origin or salient progenitors, it has gotten out of hand.

No thinking or civilized person can argue with the truthfulness of its underlying intentions. Though ethnically diverse, it is to our benefit to remain united. Using terms like nigger or honky rips the fabric of unity. Indeed, we are a nation of ethnic diversity, but it is counter productive to allow cultural diversity. The terms are often misunderstood. If one argues against cultural diversity, many have the idea that one argues against ethnic diversity. It has become popular to squash any such discussions as racist or radical and falls under the umbrella of the Political Incorrect.

One might believe that many so called Politically Incorrect actions or statements are rather shallow or that their antonym, Publically Correct, is often a bit silly. And sometimes they are. But this ideology has woven itself into the American social structure so tightly that it is destroying the body of its host. The definition of cancer above aptly describes the destruction of a body (nation) by the uncontrolled growth of cells (politically correct ideology). And like a cancer, it spreads and attacks the heart of our unity and strength through a process of national, cultural decay, and if not controlled, will help result in our nation’s death.

Is that an exaggeration?

A culture is represented by its language, its approach to science, its world view, its financial structure, its economic strength, its religious foundation, and a host of other attributes. America praises itself on being philanthropic, a nation of liberty, and a bulwark of Christian values. Mr. Obama stated that America is the greatest nation on earth. One presumes it was because of these attributes. He then made a Marxist contradiction by asking his supporters to help him change it. He followed that by stating that we are not a Christian nation. As it turns out, Politically Correctness, unabated, was part of that change in a societal preponderance of relativistic thought.

Politically Correctness has infiltrated more than its shallow underbelly. It now regulates our behavior in mathematics, science, sociology, finance, and every other strata of what was our national culture. As strange as it might seem, there is a term in use now called Anti-racist Mathematics. In short, it is the idea that minorities are not given equal advantage because the discipline is discriminatory to certain classes of citizens. I graduated from the university in mathematics. It seemed to me that math was just math. I had no idea that it was ethnic or cultural. Nor was I bright enough to know the difference. Political Correctness affects Christmas, speech, identity politics, newspeak, sex, first person language, political consciousness, Xenocentrism, and a host of cultural misanthropes.

It is a cancer that has even infected our young heroes who fight our wars. And it is leveled almost entirely by people who have not been in the military. Such judgments of behavior are easy for those who have not born the stress of combat. These young combatants, who do our bidding, carry considerable weight on their backs. Temperatures are either unbearably hot or painfully cold. Hours and often days are spent in the field without facilities. Each day ends in exhaustion. One’s butt cheeks become so chaffed that walking is painful. One’s pants often become laden with excrement and urine. The average person would not tolerate the food for more than a day. Body order is appalling. The nights are filled with terror. One opines endlessly whether he will run out of ammunition or that his weapon will fail. And then there is the constant threat of death. And many either come to that fate or are seriously injured for life. The enemy is known to do appalling and barbaric things to him if he is caught. Strange illnesses attack those in a strange land, some that are un-diagnosable.

And if that is not enough, he is constantly followed by cameras and news crews who his own superiors have authorized. They transmit his every move back to a citizenry that knows not his torture but who judges him under the guise of Politically Correctness. Why? To appease whom?
Recent examples illustrate this misguided pejorative and its affect on a whole society. Navy SEALS were sent on a mission to capture and extract the ringleader of those who killed, mutilated, burned, and then hung Americans from a bridge over the Euphrates River. This barbarian, Ahmed Hashim Abed, apparently claims some little boo-boo at some point in his capture. But this is only according to Ahmed after being turned over to the Iraqi authorities. There were no witnesses. These men are now up on charges. Ringleaders of the WTC bombing are being tried in a civilian court. Many in America decry the water boarding or other mild interrogation methods of them while at Gitmo. I went through much more in Special Forces training. An adherent to the religion of Islam was trained as a physiatrist on tax payer’s dollars. Military authorities were remiss in asking questions and taking this individual to task. The result: he killed 13 people and wounded scores more as they were being processed for deployment. Our southern border remains a war zone as the administration hurries to appease Mexican elitists.

Why? The ever spreading forms of Political Correctness? A country filled with illiterate and obese pansies (Seventy five percent of our young are not eligible for the military because of this ridiculous situation)? A nation that has lost is way, its will, its integrity, its fortitude (Less than 2 percent of our nation is active military. Less than 9 percent are veterans.)? A nation who cannot remove their thumbs from their Blackberry, who cannot get their ass off the couch, watching the newest reality show or the latest football game, who cannot get themselves out of bed before noon? A nation of bodies mutilated with ink in an effort to show their individuality? And yet, at that late hour of the day, some find themselves putting on their protesting apparel and rushing to the latest political identity rally or special interest group meeting to have lunch and plan how to change their country’s values to match and indulge their own sick desires?

Yes, like cancer, Political Correctness begins from hundreds of point sources, each with eloquent arguments for its righteousness, for its virtue, for its holy grail and for its supposed point of light to the rest of the world. And it migrates from its original source to distant sites. In the meantime, it not only suppresses the traditional functioning of a culture but slowly destroys it. And like a cancer, if not controlled, will result in death.

At its heart, Political Correctness is denial. Denial has no survival value.

Robert Bork

Bork has written several books, including Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, in which he argues that the rise of the New Left in the 1960s in the U.S. has undermined the moral standards necessary for civil society, and spawned a generation of intellectuals who oppose Western civilization.

Outliving a Liberal Activist – Part Two

The activism of the 60’s fueled a liberal philosophy far greater than any of its leaders or its followers imagined. It gave young people a feeling of abandoned freedom to circumvent reason and responsibility, to test the system, and to disenfranchise liberty and traditional values through misplaced idealism.

I spent part of my youth enamored with the works of Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Like many I was a lost soul, looking for an identity. It led me, at times, into the gutter, into the back streets of poverty, and into the lives of the homeless.

I played bongos for strippers in Juarez, Mexico, slept in the gutter, trolled the streets of the most seedy and dangerous neighborhoods of Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, and I believed, in my idealism, that my upbringing was nothing short of sanctimonious tripe. My protest was against the establishment and of anything conventional, rigorous, or even normal. I was 24.

I was not alone. Scores of young people in those days began to project politics, religion, and American values as hypocritical. It was a value changing decade throughout Western Civilization. It seemed chic to look for radical ideas of the past and promote their misguided and sociopathic idealism. It all seemed so … well … romantic, charming, and roguish. It was bullshit.

It gave rise to a much more insidious and dangerous progressive movement that intellectuals immersed themselves in with abandon. In the depths of their study they lost sight of common sense, reality, and historical perspective. It became popular to engage the idealism of youth through fevered monologue. While it began as the poetry of a youthful disdain for parental conformity, it became a very complex set of arguments.

Relativism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, Marxism, all become the daily bread of progressive thought. And with it began the siege on American culture. It all seemed so benign during the 80’s and 90’s, all while a well tutored minority gathered strength. They infiltrated the media where they were given free reign by the first amendment to engage in a brilliant scheme of mind control. Even the assault on traditional Christianity is being joined by Christians. The arguments were so well tuned by that time that people would nod their heads in agreement. It all seemed so true and kind and virtuous. It did as well to the Danish, the French, and much of Europe. And it does now to many Americans.

But Denmark, France, and most of Europe are in the throes of losing their identity. French President Sarkozy has finally been forced to stand up against the onslaught of France’s cultural decay in a recent declaration to the UN, as has the Australian parliament and their Prime Minister. The same movement is happening in other Western countries. .

Who are these liberal progressives? We understand the infiltration of our culture by Muslims, for example, but why the assault from within our own ranks? To understand that, one must understand the origin and goals of liberal progressives. They were fueled largely from the idealism of the 60’s and perpetuated by a new cultural type unto itself. They are people who produce nothing, who do not own businesses, who do no manual labor, who are not farmers, and who are primarily urban. They understand the inner city and the appeal of Utopia speak.

They are self-appointed “progressive” social engineers and Utopian idealists who subvert and rape uninformed souls through an eloquent and insidious attack on their common sense. And with it they seize power, advantage, and control. They infiltrate government, replace the bureaucratic machine with their own, and prey on corporate money in a conspiracy to appropriate economic hegemony. This tandem coupling supports its own cultural regime, far from that of our founding. And with it, the financial elite continue to rape the working family through trickery, using that family's own tax dollar to plunder profit.

But chic is beginning to lose its flavor. Western civilization is beginning to rise in a belated effort to save itself. Those who do produce, who do labor, who do own small businesses, who do live apart from the hustle amid the grime of concrete, asphalt, project housing, and the grid locked traffic of Washington D.C. are taking up their guns and their religion and rebelling.

No, I shall not outlive the activists nor the minorities and special interest groups who shout from rooftops. When Samuel Adams remarked that ““It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless, minority; keen to set brush fires in people’s minds …” he might well have stated the case for the liberal activists and the strides they have made to unravel a culture. But we know that was not the case. He was stating an axiom apropos to his day and the colonist’s situation. Were he alive today his statement would be directed not as a call to arms against British tyranny, but against the onslaught of constitutional adulteration, at the unwieldy growth of government, at the ever increasing and ratcheting of taxation, and at the fevered efforts of fascist statists to subvert an entire cultural to satisfy their own misguided dementia and profit taking from working America.

Yes, I am running out of heart beats. The mindlessness of political correctness and the clever admonishment of protest is a combination too tightly woven within our complex social structure, as broken as it might be, for the successful rise of a people or for a call to arms any time soon to combat a clever tyranny.

When I finally came to my senses and realized the profane and sociopathic ideology of liberal activism, I ran for the hills, or the rice paddies as it were. Like it or not, agree with it or not, it was time for me to do it or get off the pot (pun not intended). Truth is, I was not smart enough to know if the damned thing was right or wrong, but I had to sleep with myself at night. Helping young GI’s in the Asian jungle seemed more truthful than helping them with purulent protests in the midst of long haired yippee clowns assailing Chicago.

It remains apropos to quote a fella named Jefferson once again:

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Thomas Jefferson

And from a lady friend who infers that I might be plagiarizing:

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. - Edward R. Murrow

Alan Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin



“Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass”

Kids chase him
thru screendoor summers

Thru the back streets
of all my memories

Somewhere a man laments
upon a violin

A doorstep baby cries
and cries again
like
a
ball
bounced
down steps

Which helps the afternoon arise again
to a moment of remembered hysteria

“Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass”

Kids chase him

–Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind)

Outliving a Liberal Activist – Part One

It was 1968 when I took a bit of a side trip from a camp in Southeast Asia, took a taxi to a suggested hotel, and was walking through the lobby. It was the first television set I had seen since leaving the states several months earlier. Watching TV was not in my job description. But, what the hell, there it was. I was at first confused by what I saw on the tube. A young fellow with long, fuzzy hair was speaking, rather yelling, very animatedly. After some concentrated effort, I realized that he was speaking out against the war and against me as a warrior. His name was Jerry Rubin. He seemed a joke to me, but in the ensuing months he and his followers became anything but a joke.

Rubin not only protested the war, but also those of us who participated in it.

Rubin has since passed on. Luckily, I, who was part of what he protested, keep on going. His pal, Abbie Hoffman, has passed away as well, his demise taken as a suicide. David Dellinger followed suit in 2004. There were other activist leaders at the meeting: Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. Known as the Chicago Eight, some continued such activities throughout their lives. Two at least were awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience or some other similar accolade.

People have to applaud their dedication to whatever nebulous goal their protests were aimed. However, some became businessmen, entrepreneurs, and/or teachers, and were subjected to hostility from previous followers as traitors (to their cause). It was not these eight who shaped our present society in any case. Indeed, it is those thousands who minds those activists shaped. And it is those minds that are setting policy and indoctrinating our children today.

In large part their world was not only one of American anarchism, it was antiestablishmentarianism, a movement against any form of “the system” anywhere, and it was through not only hostility but irresponsible, juvenile, and comic antics. Rubin, in particular, was more enamored with the fun and visibility of the act than with its content.

Their overall social disdain came, sometimes, as much from cowardice as a need for fame. While they did not want war, while they did not want to put their lives in danger, apparently part of a noble cause, they did not respect the death or sacrifice of those who chose to help their fellow Americans who were already slogging through the rice paddies.

These were the seeds of American discontent with tradition, with public faith, with the sanctity of marriage, with the right to life of unborn infants, with the free market place, with the right to own property, with conservative free press and speech, and with self determination. And these seeds were planted throughout the western world as young men and women took up the activist sword in Europe as well.

But my outliving such liberal activism now seems an impossibility. The many thousands whose minds they influenced now fill the halls of our congress, our administration, our universities, our high schools, and our elementary schools. They fill our institutions, our churches, our commerce, and almost every facet of the social structure of Western Civilization.

It has been 41 years since I sat in front of that TV set and pondered the comic antics of cowardice. It has been 41 years since I saw young men die while others at home strutted their disdainful and disrespectful routines within the judicial system, thumbing their noses at America. In later years these activists were given kudus and awards from progressive intellectuals while their counterparts, the soldiers, lay still in the muck of a hot and humid jungle, dead and forgotten.

Did they protest to save those young men? I think not. They protested for the sake of protesting, for the visibility it gave them, for the disdain they held for the generation that bore them. It was a wonderful lark. But in their protest they were responsible for the lives of many who fell. Can only a soldier understand that?

When I left for Southeast Asia in 1968, people would stop their cars and shake my hand, offer me a ride or a steak dinner. On my return in 1969, our country had turned its back on us. These activists had been successful in turning the American people against us. Ironically, hardly anyone would admit to being in Vietnam or talk about it in those days. While 2,709,918 souls were true Vietnam vets, 9,492,958 now falsely claim to have served in Vietnam. Why this sudden popularity, enough to have people lying about their service, even building their careers on it? See the book Stolen Valor. It shows how people claiming to be vets with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can collect VA money monthly the rest of their lives. Not only that, once the venom of the Jerry Rubins, Abbie Hoffmans, Alan Ginsberbs, Jane Fondas and others of their ilk had passed, it became macho to say one was in the war.

Though times and people are fickle, the changes brought about by such people as Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti fermented through the generations of our youth. In my youth, as a philosophy student at the university, I thought these people, particularly Ferlinghetti, innovative, daring, romantic, and gave a young man an identity for which we all seek after leaving the family nest. But my mind changed as I realized that society will tolerate only a certain amount of decadence. Subconsciously, though not consciously, I came to understand that American society continues into deeper decadence simply by redefining its terms. And thus, over time, primarily because of the activism of the 60’s, society gave free reign to pornography, homosexuality, sexual profanity and promiscuity, social activism, anarchy, and movements against every facet of American culture, tradition, and values. Certainly, what was not tolerated 40 years ago is quite normal today. And it is because these same activists have used our very freedom to allow such decadence that they have impugned the concept of liberty and the traditional fabric of our values.

Are we free to display our Christian/Judeo faith and heritage publically? Atheists, activists, and those few who misinterpret separation of church and state say no. Are we free to display and promote pornography? Our liberal judicial system and activists says yes. Are we free to say our fallen were murdered by Muslim Terrorists? Activists and the politically correct cowards say no. This disparate list is so large now that it becomes not a bruise but a cancer upon a nation.

These activist sentiments spur government expansion in an effort to take over our lives. The concept of liberty has been twisted, adulterated, and manipulated in such a way that traditional American values are eroding one bite at a time.

I see people in the ER or hospital who have multiple, elaborate tattoos, piercings, an expensive cell phone or Blackberry, and smoking. They have no job and are not looking for one. Most spend their evenings drinking beer. Their clothes are below their buttocks, their shoes expensive Niki’s, and their designer shorts sport a crotch almost to their knees. Their knowledge of American history is dull and void, their pride, if they have any, displaced.

“Our nation’s health care crisis in not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is crisis of culture – a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. A culture that thinks I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me.” Starner Jones, MD

Self-appointed “progressive” social engineers and Utopian idealists have subverted and raped our souls through a quite eloquent and insidious attack on our common sense.

And in such times as these, what would people of conscience do?

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Thomas Jefferson

“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless, minority; keen to set brush fires in people’s minds …” Samuel Adams

You cannot continue to deny that wolves are upon you and still expect your liberty to survive.