Imagine having the opportunity to see Johnny Cash, with Elvis Presley his opening act, in concert at a high school. The concert was at Arkansas High School in Swifton, Ark., today in 1955:
Today in 1961, the Beatles played a concert at the Palais Ballroom in Aldershot, Great Britain. Because the local newspaper wouldn’t accept the promoter’s check for advertising, the concert wasn’t publicized, and attendance totaled 18.
After the concert, the Beatles reportedly were ordered out of town by local police due to their rowdiness.
That, however, doesn’t compare to what happened in New Haven, Conn., today in 1967. Before the Doors concert in the New Haven Arena, a policeman discovered singer Jim Morrison making out in a backstage shower with an 18-year-old girl.
The officer, unaware that he had discovered the lead singer of the concert, told Morrison and the woman to leave. After an argument, in which Morrison told the officer to “eat it,” the officer sprayed Morrison and his new friend with Mace. The concert was delayed one hour while Morrison recovered.
Halfway through the first set, Morrison decided to express his opinion about the New Haven police, daring them to arrest him. They did, on charges of inciting a riot, public obscenity and decency. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.
Today in 1940, the first NFL championship game was broadcast nationally on Mutual radio. Before long, Mutual announcer Red Barber probably wondered why they’d bothered.
Today in 1963, Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped from a Lake Tahoe hotel. He was released two days later after his father paid $240,000 ransom. The kidnappers were arrested and sentenced to prison.
I believe it critical—absolutely critical—to note that a conservatism that embraces conformity or group think is no conservatism at all. It is merely a bizarre and unthinking traditionalism.
Any real conservatism must take into account several things. First, conservatism must accept the principle that each person is a unique reflection of the infinite. That is, each new person in the world arrives in a certain time and place, armed with certain gifts and weighed down by general faults. This person will never be repeated. She is unique, a particular manifestation of the Infinite and loving face of God.
Second, a real conservatism must accept that there are limits not only to the knowledge and wisdom any one person or group of persons understand or possess, but also a limit to what humanity—from Adam to the last man—can understand.
For as far back as I can remember, conservatism, broadly defined, struck me as the only sensible and humane way to view the world. The liberals I knew and saw in the news (Tip O’Neill and others) were among the most conformist, intolerant, and unimaginative lot…imaginable. When I heard others argue that liberalism (classical or modern) is good because it defends free speech, art, etc., I found it highly implausible. Anyone with the power of reason and observation knew these things to be blatantly and utterly false. …
Indeed, one of the things I love most about the “right” of the 1940s and 1950s was its desire to fight authority and proclaim the dignity of the human person. Think of Bernard Iddings Bell’s amazing book, Crowd Culture, Kirk’s struggle against “capitalists, socialists, and communists” in a Prospects for Conservatives, Eliot’s call for a “Republic of Letters,” Bradbury’s chastisement of the censors, and, especially, Thomas Merton’s claiming that the mass man is somehow even below fallen humanity.
As I grow older, I’m no longer as sure that conservatism is the protector of real diversity. I’ve not changed my mind about liberals or liberalism as a whole. Liberalism, or what remained of it, ran its course by the beginning of World War II. But, recently, I’ve seen the same trends in those who call themselves conservative or who embrace what they call “conservatism.” Now, I must wonder if what I saw in the 1980s was merely that the conservatives had yet to succumb to the forces of mass thought, group think, etc.
So many people among modern conservatism are, frankly, buffoons. Think about the governor of a western state who became a candidate for a major office and then the “star” of a reality show. Really? Or, how about the well-endowed plastic people on FOX? Or how about those with grand media access who claim to speak for the rest of us? These so called conservatives denigrate the liberal arts, mock women, and undermine our most sacred traditions. Give me a Kirk, a Bradbury, a Merton any day over these fruit-nuts.
I am not a name or a number, I am a free man. And, so are you.
How about that — a writer channeling his inner Number Six:
Perhaps I feel this way because I was never in (what appeared to me to be) the accepted social set in middle or high school, or because I’m in a line of work that demands (if you’re doing it right) independence. But there are a disturbing number of people today who anoint themselves the gatekeepers for who is a true Republican, or true Catholic, or true conservative, or true Packer fan, and who is not. (Obviously one of these is not like the other …)
I studiously try (though imperfectly) to avoid doing that. Since, as I’ve stated before, I’m not a Republican, it’s not up to me to decide who’s a Republican and who’s a Republican In Name Only. I assume it’s up to the GOP, of which I am not a member, to do that. I also assume it’s up to the Roman Catholic Church, of which I am not a member anymore, to decide who is a true Catholic and who is not. It’s their church, not yours, or mine, though I do think it’s fair to point out who’s trying to be a Catholic while failing to live up to the church’s tenets, which are pretty self-evident.
I think it’s also fair to point out that one of the central tenets of those who wear the collars in the Catholic Church, obedience to authority, is not really in keeping with the heritage of the United States. (That’s not why I left the church, but I’ve had my decision to leave the church validated numerous times since then. The only way in which the Roman Catholic Church is a democracy is its members’ ability to vote with their feet and their wallets.)
I think I need to rephrase that last non-parenthetical sentence. Obedience to authority is not really in keeping with the heritage of the United States … or at least it wasn’t in pre-Barack Obama America. Back when defying authority was fashionable, Bruce Springsteen began his cover of Edwin Starr’s “War” by announcing that “… Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.” Neither Springsteen nor the rest of his entertainment industry ilk, with exceptions you can count on one hand (for instance, James Woods, who should expect an IRS audit anytime now) have expressed the same misgivings about their president, despite the fact that things have not been worse for Springsteen’s supposed inspiration, the blue-collar man, since the Great Depression.
It’s hard work to make judgments based on individual issues, but it’s more intellectually honest. It’s also more difficult to not blindly follow the crowd, but (as survivors of high school learn) the crowd is often wrong. It’s lonely sometimes to go your own way (among other things, you get falsely accused of arrogance), but, to quote John F. Kennedy, life is unfair.
Stratford Caldecott reflects on something that in this house is ready while I am still clinically dead — that is, before the alarm goes off:
I was introduced to great-tasting coffee a long time ago in Vermont, by a man who brewed it in test-tubes and fed it through an enormous filtering machine to make sure every molecule was just right. I know coffee is important in England too, but the differences are significant. The Scientific Revolution was partly founded on coffee, not tea. Both came from overseas, as valued imports traded across an evolving colonial landscape, but tea flourished in the intimate domestic setting of the upper classes, who could afford imported china to drink it from, whereas coffee was an urban and intellectual drink.
The first English coffee houses were opened in the seventeenth century in London and Oxford. By 1675 there were more than 3,000 of them around the country. Members of the Royal Society would sit around, vibrating with caffeine, and discover steam engines and gravity. Well, not quite like that—in the case of gravity it was more that a coffee-house conversation between Hooke, Halley, and Wren failed to solve the problem, and led them to send a letter to Isaac Newton, which got him working on the problem at home. But it has been said that the coffee-houses served a similar function to the internet today—a social network making possible the accelerated exchange of ideas (a network that the government of the time tried, and failed, to control). …
The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia. From Mocha, coffee spread to Egypt and North Africa, and by the sixteenth century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, and Turkey. From the Middle East, coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, and coffee plants were transported by the Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas. …
If we take coffee as a symbol for the mysticism of love, we might say that it is even more necessary than tea. A society that is not permeated by mysticism—which I take to be the inner dimension of religion—will inevitably fragment, and this begins with a schism between Left and Right, between the two types of practical atheism, of secular humanism; the collectivist and individualist types. Everything in such a society tends to be given a political interpretation. …
But is such a “mystical turn” in the cards? During the hippy movement of the 1960s it almost seemed so–at least to the hippies, who seemed to think sex, drugs, and music held the key to world peace and cosmic consciousness. Not any more. Most of the hippies have cut their hair and settled down. As for Christians in general, the robust statistics for churchgoing and religious activism render the need for mysticism invisible.
In any case genuine mysticism is not as superficial as it seemed in the 60s and 70s. It cannot be detached from particular religious traditions. Intoxication with the love of God cannot be imbibed through a pipe or ingested with mushrooms. It lies beyond the rational intellect (that part is true), but it isn’t anti-rational. The cultivation of the intuitive intellect is a precise science. Pope John Paul II promoted it most strongly in his encyclical on philosophy, Fides et Ratio. There he insisted that Catholic priests should be trained in a philosophy “of genuinely metaphysical range” (n. 83), a “philosophy of being” (n. 97). Mysticism is not metaphysics, but complements it. …
Look deep into your cup of coffee and see in its mysterious depths the fate of America. Ask yourself, is there a home here for mysticism or metaphysics, or only a culture war between mad men, rationalists whose philosophical assumptions confine them to a world of politics and economics, seeking material comfort rather than divine wisdom?
On that day, a free festival in Altamont, Calif., featured the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby Stills Nash & Young.
The festival, attended by 300,000, also featured one concertgoer being stabbed to death by a member of the Hell’s Angels hired for security, plus a drowning and two men dying in a hit-and-run crash.
Get the feeling that Mark Steyn isn’t a fan of Barack Obama?
For much of last year, a standard trope of President Obama’s speechwriters was that there were certain things only government could do. “That’s how we built this country — together,” he declared. “We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together.” As some of us pointed out, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, you could have built 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges — or one mega–Golden Gate Bridge stretching from Boston to just off the coast of Ireland. Yet there isn’t a single bridge, or a single dam (“You will never see another federal dam,” his assistant secretary of the interior assured an audience of environmentalists). Across the land, there was not a thing for doting network correspondents in hard hats to stand in front of and say, “Obama built this.”
Until now, that is. Obamacare is as close to a Hoover Dam as latter-day Big Government gets. Which is why its catastrophic launch is sobering even for those of us who’ve been saying for five years it would be a disaster. It’s as if at the ribbon-cutting the Hoover Dam cracked open and washed away the dignitaries; as if the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to traffic with its central span missing; as if Apollo 11 had taken off for the moon but landed on Newfoundland. Obama didn’t have to build a dam or a bridge or a spaceship, just a database and a website. This is his world, the guys he hangs with, the zeitgeist he surfs so dazzlingly, Apple and Google, apps and downloads. But his website’s a sclerotic dump, and the database is a hacker’s heaven, and all that’s left is the remorseless snail mail of millions and millions of cancellation letters.
For the last half-century, Obama has simply had to be. Just being Obama was enough to waft him onwards and upwards: He was the Harvard Law Review president who never published a word, the community organizer who never organized a thing, the state legislator who voted present. And then one day came the day when it wasn’t enough simply to be. For the first time in his life, he had to do. And it turns out he can’t. He’s not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. And Healthcare.gov is about what you’d expect if you nationalized a sixth of the economy and gave it to the Assistant Deputy Commissar of the Department of Paperwork and the Under-Regulator-General of the Bureau of Compliance.
Politics, the late Christopher Hitchens used to say, is show business for ugly people. But it’s also ugly business for show people. Thatcherism is a political philosophy; Obamaism is a vibe, a groove, a pose, an aesthetic. When his speechwriters are cooking, he’ll get them to work up a little riff about how it’s not about Big Government vs. Small Government, it’s about “smarter” government. A few months ago, he even gave it a hashtag! #SmarterGov. How cool is that? “Smart” refers less to the product than to the guys pitching it. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” said the historian Michael Beschloss the day after Obama’s election. In an embarrassing effusion even by his own standards, another smart guy, the New York Times‘ house conservative David Brooks, noted the incoming administration’s narrow range of almae matres and cooed: “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard–Yale game anytime over the next four years, we’re screwed.” Obama and his courtiers were the smartest guys in town, so naturally their government would be smarter than all previous governments. A few weeks before Obamacare’s launch, one of the smart set, Dan Pfeiffer, promised it would be “a consumer experience unmatched by anything in government, but also in the private sector.” And he was right, kind of.
We keep hearing about how the Republican Party is full of radical Tea Party crazies. But our latest IBD/TIPP Poll shows that it’s Democrats who are out of touch with reality and well outside the mainstream.
The public overwhelmingly believes the country is headed in the wrong direction, that current economic policies aren’t working, that President Obama is doing a bad job, that government should be smaller and that ObamaCare should be repealed. But not Democrats.
Onissue after issue, in fact, Democrats are the outliers by wide margins, according to an analysis of the December IBD/TIPP survey.
They are, by and large, Pollyanna-ish about the economy, they can see no evil when it comes to Obama or ObamaCare, and they are extremists when it comes to the size and role of the federal government.
To get a sense of just how out to lunch Democrats are these days, consider:
The economy is barely moving after four years of Obama’s “recovery,” there are millions who’ve given up looking for work, household incomes are down and poverty is up.
Not surprisingly, 64% of the public says the country is headed in the wrong direction — 71% of independents say this. But those who identify themselves as Democrats are positively upbeat. Two-thirds, in fact, are perfectly satisfied with the country’s direction. …
It’s worth noting, too, that onquestion after question, Republicans and independents are more closely aligned than independents and Democrats. You can see that clearly in the charts above.
It’s true that some of these responses simply show Democrats rallying around their guy in the White House. But the fact is that Republicans were more willing to admit to George W. Bush’s faults as a leader when they emerged, and own up to a bad economy during his tenure. …
The only reason Obama and his fellow Democrats aren’t constantly tagged as extreme is because the press is so far left that it treats them as reasonable centrists. Meanwhile, by skewing the polls, the increasingly radicalized Democratic Party manages to make the country appear more liberal than it really is.
What is sickening about these poll results is that back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Democratic Party was the natural home of people who questioned the status quo, from Vietnam to Jim Crow laws. (Even though the former was started by Democrats, and the latter was the idea of southern Democrats.) It seems today that the correct symbol for the Democratic Party is a sheep.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 