MLK, the NFL, Rudy in Richmond and socialism vs. libertarianism.
Don’t tell the P.C. police I’m working on MLK Day, I’ll probably get arrested.
Weekend protesters.
Headline on Yahoo! news today: “
Possible Iraq War Draws Weekend Protests.”
“Weekend protests.” Boy, sometimes doesn’t the headline just say it all? Weekend anti-war protesters, out to change the world on their days off.
Chesterfield County racism, part 2.
Big whoop-de-doo in the ever-inane Chesterfield County here. Old-time Clubbeaux readers will remember Chesterfield County (just south of Richmond) as the one which decided to force distasteful groups who wish to exercise their rights of free speech in the county to pay for all associated police, sanitation and crowd control costs – which the county would set. It stems back to a big deal the county made a few months ago over some white racist idiots booking library time to spew whatever foul drivel they spew.
In other words, if, say, the K.K.K. wanted to hold a seminar at the local public library the county would say “Hmmm, we think you’ll need to hire… 37 uniformed officers, three garbage collections and 25 marshals.” The K.K.K. would say we can’t afford that, look all we want to do is have one of our people speak at the library for about an hour to anyone who’s interested.
Sorry, the county would say, permission denied. Pretty cute, huh? Goodbye free speech in Chesterfield County, Virginia. If the county’s Board of Supervisors approves of you and your message you’ll speak, if not, tough luck. Oh and anyone who thinks the new rules would apply to Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton, think again. Black racists are fine in Chesterfield County, it’s the white ones who aren’t allowed.
Anyway Chesterfield’s had a couple missed days of school this year, and needed to make them up by going to school on holidays, so the BLACK administrator in charge of the scheduling decided to take MLK Day, today, as a make-up day. Goodness sakes, you would’ve thought Chesterfield would have declared today Jim Crow Day and all niggers should be lynched. You never heard such idiotic rhetoric and self-righteous squealing – well, unless you attended the Board of Supervisors meeting setting up the Take Away The Right of Free Speech policy.
It’s difficult for me to see how King himself, a man who fought for the rights of black children to attend the same schools as white children, would feel honored by black and white kids being held out of school on his day, and who would take it as some sort of
insult that black kids should be compelled to be educated on his day, but that’s how it always is, to paraphrase Tom Robbins: the master is killed by the disciples and a broad-minded, profound message is distorted beyond recognition by the small-minded toadies who see it only as a club with which to beat their opponents.
Watching the playoffs.
Clubbeaux admits he watched the playoffs, mostly out of the hope of seeing Warren “I Like To Hurt People For No Reason Other Than That It’s Fun” Sapp and his eternally inept Tampa Bay Buccaneers knocked out by the Eagles, but alas, the Bucs won. Just to show how smart Warren Sapp – who was not a factor in the game – is, it was his studied opinion that the Bucs should not have fired Tony Dungy and hired Jon Gruden and that born third-stringer Shaun King should have been given the chance to start the season instead of Brad Johnson. Now of course, since those two moves, hiring Jon Gruden and naming Brad Johnson the starter are 87% of the reason why the Bucs are in the Super Bowl, Sapp seems to have “forgotten” his earlier pronouncements.
Go Raiders. You’ve gotta at least have a sneaking admiration for Al Davis, the last non-corporate cog in the slick corporate commercialized marketing venture that is the NFL.
And by the way, Clubbeaux would pay for a new feature on remote controls which allowed pictures to be blacked out instead of sound muted. I don’t see why 5-year old kids should be forced to sit through PG-13 commercials and show previews when they aren’t allowed to go see those kinds of movies. I’d rather my kids not see those Coors Light ads and that Miller Lite ad with the two underwear-clad girls fighting in the water and wet cement, but I don’t want to miss the game so if I could black out the picture but still get the sound I would.
Muravchik on socialism.
Reading the book my wife gave me for Christmas, Joshua Muravchik’s
Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. It’s a great read as Muravchik follows socialism not as a bunch of dry, idiotic theories with statistics on Soviet grain production but as the story of the people who shaped it. He starts off in the French Revolution with Francois-Noel Babeuf, which is about where I am.
It’s a source of constant amusement to Clubbeaux, the fascination Europe has with America, and how they always miss the whole point. As Muravchik writes “The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen tracked the U.S. Declaration of Independence in proclaiming the reason for government was to secure men’s rights.” Fair enough, but whereas the Declaration was for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the French rallied for “liberty, property, security” – and “equality.”
Looks pretty similar, some jumbled-up nice-sounding words, but they could not be more different. For one thing the Declaration valued life. The French, judging from the subsequent Reign of Terror, did not. But whereas Americans believed in the
pursuit of happiness (a fatuous end to pursue, but we’ll let it go with the kindest interpretation of “the sort of dignified, meaningful life you would want to secure for yourself”), meaning let’s let everyone start out on the same foot and do the best they can for themselves, the French desired “security” and “equality.” In other words, everybody
ending up in the same place.
Today that’s the difference between Americans and Europeans. Americans have thought, until recently, that individual rights, the rights of people to carve out a life for themselves, are paramount and there ain’t no snot-nosed bureaucrat going to decide for me how much of my money I can keep and how much goes to support lazy shiftless freeloaders who don’t have the sand to get off their asses and work. Europeans think oh how terrible that you who work hard and sacrifices to buy nice things for your family have more than this lazy shiftless freeloader, why just look how his human dignity is being degraded.
(By the way, one almost infallible way to quickly discern the true intent of anybody’s rhetoric is to follow out in your mind the subject behind passive verb constructs and always get back to a real person for a subject. If somebody says “Hispanic culture isn’t being respected,” ask yourself “If this were made into an active verb, who would be doing the disrespecting?” There’s the real target of mulitculturalism right there.
(In the above example you, being sensible, would think that the lazy sod himself was degrading his own human dignity. The socialist would say no, society forced him into this. Of course “society” never does anything, only people do things, and it doesn’t take much to figure out who the person at the butt end of this statement is, does it, Mr. Taxpayer?)
Europeans, especially from about World War II on, crave nothing more than security. Sure I’ll give half my earnings to the government so they can send it to subsidize Palestinian Muslim suicide bombers, art exhibits nobody cares about and a ridiculously inefficient Brussels-based bureaucracy, because in return
I’ll be taken care of. I can mindlessly punch a clock at a gray little job somewhere and I’ll have health care, my kids will go to school and I’ll never get anywhere. But that’s okay, because I’ll be safe.
Americans like seeing everyone have the same opportunities, and letting them do what they want with them. Two classmates sitting beside each other at college graduation, one ends up clerking in a live bait shop in Alaska and one ends up on the board of Merrill Lynch. That’s America. Bill Cosby ends up rich and famous, Gary Coleman ends up as a janitor somewhere, Michael Jackson ends up a crazy white woman. That’s America.
Europeans are fascinated by this but they don’t understand it – “How can a nation that lets Bill Gates get sixty billion dollars let its people starve and freeze to death in the streets,” is the Eurosocialist’s dilemma. The proper answer, of course, is that the nation doesn’t “let” it happen, the people themselves make free choices. The nation lets the bum decide if he wants to work that day or not. He chooses not to, fine, that’s his choice and these are his consequences.
Libertarianism and socialism.
Some say libertarianism is the answer. No government, just enforce property rights and contracts (the two areas of law most near and dear to the hearts of the rich) and have at it. This of course isn’t the answer either – I’d like to see a bunch of libertarians play a football game with the same level of rules allowed. Laws are necessary for the conduct of an orderly society, but neither the market nor the government should be given carte blanche to set those rules.
It’s well-known that socialism’s fatal flaw, why it’s never worked anywhere and why it never will work anywhere, is that it assumes people are basically good, that given the chance they will do good. I would have thought that one of the strongest recommendations of solid evangelical Christianity is its firm belief that no, mankind is not basically good it is basically evil, which is one of the few religious beliefs put forward anywhere which can be confirmed simply by flipping through a newspaper.
You don’t find many solid evangelical Christians as committed socialists. You don’t find many solid evangelical Christians as libertarians, either. You tend to find functional atheists at both ends of the “all government or no government” spectrum. Socialism preaches that it’s just society that’s screwed up, not people, but why good people keep forming screwed-up societies is never explained. Libertarians assume that financial logic would keep everything running smoothly yet why racism, which makes absolutely no financial sense whatsoever, flourishes in every society on Earth is never explained.
The Christian philosophy is that humans are inherently evil, and that even Christians commit sins – the apostle Paul himself lamented that he could not do that which he wanted to do but found himself doing that which he did not want to do. Yet in an ordered, structured society founded on Christian moral principles of individual responsibility and accountability society can flourish. Socialists hate the Christian moral principles part and seek to substitute their own secular nostrums in place of it, libertarians hate the ordered and structured part and say hey, let’s just let the invisible hand of the markets dictate everything and everybody just play nicely, now.
Socialism is one myth that’s doomed to fail. Libertarianism is another. I find myself in the middle – I vote Libertarian in elections, less government is better than more government and I think it’d be all to the good if there were more libertarians than socialists in office, but I rather like the National Park system. I rather like knowing that health inspectors check out the restaurants I take my family to. I rather like city work crews repairing streets. I’ll put up with a little socialism in that regard, and I suspect most honest libertarians would say the same thing.
Rudy in Richmond.
My friend runs a media tours service in Washington, D.C. and occasionally they’ll have an author come through on a book tour who has an event in Richmond. He’ll call me to handle it and I will, it’s fun and it gets me out of the home office. Saturday ex-New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani came to the Borders out West Broad Street to sign his book
Leadership.
Everything went fine, it’s not a Stone Cold Steve Austin crowd or anything. There were two uniformed officers, Guiliani’s personal security detail and store employees keeping everything running smoothly. About 400 people showed up to get books signed.
Chatting with one of the officers as we watched the line he said it amazes me, really. I work a lot of NASCAR events out at the track, he said, and I know all those guys, I’ve been in Dale Earnhardt’s house drinking beer and he’s been in mine, and it’s funny to see people get all googly-eyed and stammering around someone whose ass I can kick in pool.
I agreed yeah, and said right after the Gulf War when Gen. Schwarzkopf was doing lecture and book tours, that was the only time in my life I’d ever seen
peace officers – on-duty cops and security guards, FBI agents and uniformed servicemen rush the stage to get autographs. He said oh yeah, I’d do that too. I notice he put his copy of
Leadership in the stack in the staff room to get signed as well.
I asked the store manager if this was the biggest signing they’d had and he said oh no, we had about the same crowd for Fergie last year and when Dale Earnhardt, Jr. came to sign we had at least – at least – a thousand people here: “We put pork rinds on the café menu that day.”
Grouchy and hilarious.
It’s always nice when somebody not only reads a post of mine but improves upon it. Clubbeaux salutes
Grouchy Old Cripple for dwelling at hilarious length upon yet another facet of Washington Sen. Patty Murray bin Laden’s stupidity.
