Opinion-Columns.com

An Infuriatingly Wimpy Message that “America Can Do Better.”

John Kerry’s acceptance speech somehow refused to go after President Bush’s record over the past three and a half years and instead emphasized the message, over and over, that America can do better.

What the hell does that mean? That America’s doing okay, but could be improved?

George Bush has broken every single campaign promise he made. He promised balanced budgets and immediately gave away a thirteen hundred billion dollar tax break that went overwhelmingly to the rich. He promised to bring honesty to the office and lied his way into war. He promised to leave no child behind and cut Head Start as well as entirely defunding Reading Is Fundamental, promised to protect the environment and pulled us out of the Kyoto Treaty, promised to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in the world and cut funding for antiproliferation programs, promised to protect our wild places and opened national forests to logging roads, promised to reduce industrial pollution and rolled back provisions of the Clean Air Act, promised the “W” in his initials stands for women and closed the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach, on and on go the broken promises.

George Bush changed a fifty year U.S. foreign policy strategy from deterrence to preemptive strikes and military dominance, all but trashed our relationship with the United Nations over Iraq policy, estranged the United States from its core of European support, refused to fund the United Nations Population Fund, created an Operation TIPS program for Americans to spy on each other, all of this shrouded in his declaration of “providing strong leadership in time of war.”

Damn it, John, are these some of the areas in which you think America “can do better?”

If you think the Republican Convention is going to follow the Dem’s lead of taking the high road, you’re not only going to be surprised, but you’re going to get walloped in November. There’s a record to look at over the past four years, specific areas in which George Bush said one thing and did another and you owe it to your country to point them out. This election has become too focussed on the Iraq War and the Bush administration would be delighted to keep the focus off its other broken promises.

The Multiculturalist Language Police

Been meaning to get around to this, as it’s been on my list of essay subjects, quite correctly in the category of “Things that make me nuts.”

Having harrumphed thus far into the topic, let me admit that it’s really two topics irrationally and inescapably entwined, both of which escaped my attention until I saw an article about Dianne Ravitch’s book (The Language Police) discussed at CNN.com. Amazing the things that transpire when you duck out of the country for ten or twelve years. Who’d a thunk that school book publishers would have dumbed down textbooks in the misguided quest for political correctness, quietly removing “polo” and “yacht” as elitist, “blind” as offensive and even “boyish figure” as sexist. The list goes on and I can’t wait to see it, though my copy is enroute from Amazon.

Multiculturalism is claimed as the origin of such foolishness, a modern egalitarian theory that gives equal value to all cultures, backgrounds and human conditions and insists upon that equality to the degree that we enter a Wonderland that Alice would hardly recognize. Huckleberry Finn has long been gone in most schools, vanished in absolute terror of the “n” word, no matter that it was (and is) a seminal American novel and did perhaps as much to deconstruct racism as the 60’s Civil Rights Movement. Twain wrote it for that purpose.

Multiculturalism decries the fact that America considers itself a white, Eurocentric culture, without recognizing that it was fifty-six white Europeans that signed the Declaration of Independence and thereby put their lives at risk. This country has had huge, irreplaceable contributions since that time by blacks, Hispanics, Asians, indigenous Indians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and whatever motley crews of misguided, misdirected and just plain accidental peoples of the world that found their way to these shores, but it was half a hundred white Europeans that made it possible.

Those half a hundred made it politically possible for the multicultural movement to virtually take over and make more crappy our already crappy elementary school systems, to celebrate as a cause the destruction of viable language and to further dumb-down generations of already staggeringly undereducated graduating classes. We have many freedoms in our country, certainly more than exist politically anywhere else on the planet and our freedom to be manifestly ignorant is among them.

Makes me want to signal my waitperson for another drink.

Idling Away My Sunday

Several war memoirs I’ve read recently concern the desires of men who have long been in the trenches and, unexpectedly, those dreams aren’t often directed at a steak dinner, hot shower, or even sex. The predominant wish, the same (almost to the wording) from various sources and across differing nationalities, is for a Sunday at home without any sort of stimulation whatever. Warriors yearning to be left to the enjoyment of bird chatter, gazing into an undefined middle-distance with no one shooting and no one to shoot at.

I wrote a poem once, mostly about my belief that man is at his best when idle. And I am idle and it is Sunday and no one is shooting at me. I take this moment to be grateful, to remind myself as I often do, that nobody out there conspires against me and I conspire against no man.

There is much to be loved about being unknown, unheralded, un-sought-after, unindicted, unmolested and generally left the hell alone. That great majority of us who enjoy the status of no status are able to lie on the hillside of our choice, sucking a blade of grass, perhaps in the company of someone we love, gazing at clouds and deciding how next to idle away our afternoon.

That is perhaps the greatest gift of all and I wish it for each of you.

Thank God and the Founders for the U.S. Senate

Not to sound too much like a civics professor, but the congress is made up of two houses, the House of Idiots and the House of Reason. The House of Idiots is a motley crew of over five hundred and, because it’s easy to get lost among that large a group, they say and do things that no sane man would admit to among friends. “Marriage,” they claim “is in jeopardy from activist judges” and further state (with nary a grin or snicker) that “traditional marriage is under attack by those who would strike down our marriage laws in court.” The looser among these cannons would change the Constitution to keep narrow the franchise.

I guess I missed all that “striking down” and I’m sorry about that because it’s a serious issue in the House of Idiots. That’s what happens when your attention drifts, but I was rather under the impression that we were enlarging the franchise of marriage rather than striking it down. Is the union of a man and a woman any weaker because of the union of a man and a man or a woman and a woman? Seems like they would gather strength from the commonality of unions that honor the love and commitment of two people.

But anyway, the point is that the House of Idiots will struggle in vain on this issue because the House of Reason has just kicked it out into the street where it belongs and it takes two to tango in the legislative branch. There’s only a hundred members of the House of Reason and they tend to be a tad more thoughtful on most issues, maybe because they get more individual press. Most of them agreed with Jefferson, when he wrote about religious freedom in Virginia that “whatever religion or no religion my neighbor practices, neither robs my purse nor breaks my leg.” Good point.

I think that’s analogous. Catholics hardly feel “under attack” by Presbyterians or Mormons in the business of religion, at least not in recent history. It would be particularly refreshing to hear from the nations’ pulpits that marriage is in fact stronger and more sacred by the logical extension of the franchise.

Maybe It’s Just the Rain

Looking out my window in the mountains of the Czech Republic, up near the German border and it’s rainy, chilly and never-ending. Unlike other years, April refuses to leave, even though it’s mid-July.

Perhaps that’s clouded my sense of humor as I read Stan Greenspan’s editorial from yesterday’s New York Times, chiding us on not “being ready” for another 9/11. Maybe I missed his point in all this dampness. After all, he’s a psychiatrist who “works with both children and adults,” so I guess that leaves out Barkley, my very laid-back Labrador now snoozing in the corner. But, what is the point, Stan?

Greenspan notes that “many of us are ignoring the very real dangers posed by terrorists” and goes on to posit that the average person knows not what to do if there’s a nuclear attack in the neighborhood. Well, I guess not, Stan. I lived through the good old days of clambering under our desks in school and the nuclear attack sirens that were tested every Tuesday at noon. I can’t say that experience did a whole lot for my readiness, although it supposedly damaged the psyche of a whole generation of school kids and has been reputed as the reason for children increasingly dropping out, shooting up and staring off into space when dad wants the lawn mowed.

Perhaps Greenspan feels the market for psychiatry is threatened as well and is just trying to whip up a little business. He suggests we need specific recommendations such as designating schools to obtain medical care and exiting cities “via selected routes.” Personally, my selected route would be any-way-the-hell-out-of-here. I lived in Evanston, Illinois during the bad old days just after the Ruskies lit off their first bomb. The Evanston city council actually approved an ordinance that Chicago couldn’t evacuate by way of Evanston because they’d ruin the lawns. That’s the kind of action that comes from those with too little to do.

Relax a little, Stan. Maybe go see a shrink. Our much-maligned government, through all its stumbling and bumbling, has done a thus-far pretty good job. No doubt there will be another terrorist event, but we’ll deal with it as we’ve always dealt with unexpected disasters. When your wife is at work, you’re out on a the golf course and the kids are each at different sports programs, no planning structure in the world is going to help. But it’s almost a guarantee that someone will drive across your lawn.

Try Explaining Freedom-to-Know to a Warlord

The Bush administration is in trouble for lying about the justification for a war in Iraq.

The Army and the Pentagon are in deep trouble for interrogation procedures.

Those are facts that set the Muslim world dancing in the streets and make various other anti-American hearts beat just a little faster. One can imagine Jacques Chirac stifling a smile over his evening cognac, Gerhardt Shroeder wagging a knowing German finger and various Arab governments nervously wondering where events will take them from here. Just what we deserve, they crow and are joined in that by a substantial percentage of the American public.

And it is just what we deserve. Not only what we deserve, but what we have self-inflicted and that, in fact, is the wonderment of it all and what makes us unique from all but a very few governments of the world. The salient fact is that, in both situations, the truth came from inside rather than outside America.

Muslim hatreds didn’t bring us to our knees. The “Arab street,” however you define that, had little enough effect. The United Nations, European Union, NATO, Chirac and Shroeder combined hadn’t the power to modify our intention. You can argue that they should have, and you probably are right, but the fact is they didn’t.

What may well cost this administration another term is the uniquely American constitutional protection of our citizens’ right-to-know. Powerful stuff, this freedom of the press. More powerful than presidents, than misleading by the CIA and FBI, it’s the air in the top of the American bottle that always (eventually, usually slowly, almost always painfully) allows our nation to float cork-up.

I don’t know how we explain that in meaningful terms to most of the world, let alone the warlords and dictators of this planet’s darkest corners. It is inexplicable, other than in our own nation, where we take it for granted. Americans are known for a kind of naïve optimism. It’s our inherent trust that “the truth will out” that shapes our character and keeps us from our own worst excesses.