0 comment Tuesday, September 9, 2014 | admin
The left has discovered a newfound 'patriotism', now that there are fellow travelers in charge in D.C.
Raise the Stars and Stripes High
Patriotism is cool again. Some would say patriotism, defined as "love of one�s country," never goes out of style. But to the Left, it�s clearly not an unconditional love. Narcissistic liberals demand a country in their own image.
Still, it�s good to see so many of the nation�s cultural and entertainment elite waving the flag. Hollywood producer and People for the American Way founder Norman Lear is a perfect example. Lear is so moved by the spirit of patriotism these days that he created a campaign focused on being a "Born Again American."
Unfortunately, liberals like Lear are so out of practice with patriotism that they seem to have adopted it as a surrogate spirituality, or confused it with a very un-American cult of personality.
Hope and Change
Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor, argued in a Feb. 8 Washington Post article that it�s President Barack Obama who has revived patriotism. "Barack Obama�s rise to power, has, to many people�s surprise, once again made patriotism a liberal faith." Kazin pointed out, "since liberals turned against the war in Vietnam 40 years go, they have struggled to prove that they love their country even while opposing most of the policies of its government" and they just now "have finally realized that they cannot lead America if America does not hold a privileged place in their hearts."
Yes, I've long noticed that the left's commitment to certain principles vacillates. I've noticed a conspicuous silence on the part of the usual suspects in response to the news of the administration's 'surge' in Afghanistan. What happened to their lofty antiwar principles? Are they going to be devout hawks now that one of their fellow believers is commander-in-chief? So far it looks that way.
When Bill Clinton was inaugurated, I remember a story that appeared in Newsday, about how a group of celebrity Clinton supporters at the inauguration were muttering curses when military jets flew over the ceremony; what an outrage that those evil military jets would break the sacred peace of Clinton's swearing-in. But then, the story goes, one of the celebs said 'but they're OUR jets now!' The reaction was high fives all the way around. Suddenly those malevolent jet planes were all right.
And now, apparently, 'AmeriKKKa' is worthy of the left's respect because of a change in administrations. So it seems that their loyalties to America go as far as loyalty to a personality and specifically to a personality who shares their ideology.
So excuse me if I don't tear up over their touching conversion to being 'patriots.'
The Revival of "Civic Religion"
Apparently, it took Obama�s election to rouse Norman Lear�s affection for his country. Lear is an unabashed Obama supporter. Records show Lear gave over $33,000 to Obama�s campaign, as well as an additional $50,000 toward the inauguration.
A June 6, 2008 Los Angeles Times article reported, "[Hollywood�s] elder statesman, Norman Lear, declared Obama's victory Tuesday night as 'another giant step for mankind.� (Through his group, Declare Yourself, Lear has been busy signing up young voters who seem eager to turn out for the presumptive Democratic nominee.)"
Lear refused to tell New York Times reporters Brooks Barnes and Rebecca Cathcart which nominee he supported in the 2008 general election, but in their Aug. 13 article they noted, "Still, his choice seems clear. Prominently displayed in his office during an interview was a yarmulke decorated with a campaign sticker for Senator Obama."
Wait a minute: isn't Norman Lear the guy who is always trying to stamp out religion in the public square? Hasn't he essentially devoted his life and his fortunes to agitation to remove Christianity from all public observances, and to "separate church and state''? Now, however, we are suddenly talking about 'civil religion.' What's wrong with this picture?
In case some of you have (blessedly) forgotten Lear, he was the force behind the onslaught of PC propaganda on television, starting with 'All In the Family', originally an American version of a British comedy called 'Till Death Do Us Part.' I don't know how much of the blame, therefore, belongs to Lear and his writers and how much to the originators of the British series, but Lear's politically correct 'comedies' dominated American TV for the entire decade of the 1970s and into the 80s. The image of the ignorant WASP bigot, Archie Bunker, became a stereotype of dimwitted 'right-wingers' which has persisted on the left even to this day. The fact that a real-life urban blue-collar worker would be far, far more likely to be a lockstep Democrat party-line voter made no difference to Lear and the writers. The idea was to smear old-stock Americans. And it seemed to have worked.
So, after decades of spitting in the eye of old America and the average White Christian American, liberals and leftists are suddenly 'into' patriotism? It sounds opportunistic to me. They simply want to claim 'patriotism' and thus find a phony moral perch from which to condemn everybody who doesn't fall in line behind Dear Leader.
But back to Lear's cult, I mean, 'civic religion':
At last year�s progressive Take Back America conference Lear spoke of a "civil religion." He told the audience
The phrase "civil religion" is not intended to encourage a form of national self-worship. Just the opposite. The nation wants to be subordinate to its ethical principles as presented in its founding documents � documents that guarantee freedom, due process, equal opportunity and equal justice under the law, ideals the founders pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to secure.
Yet, language used on the "Born Again American" site, in its theme song and by Lear, suggests the opposite.
Lear told Arianna Huffington, founder of the liberal Huffington Post, that Election Night 2008 was his "christening as a born again American."
I find this to be a thumb in the eye to real 'born-again' Christian believers. Every non-believer and even liberal Christians, in my experience, sneer at the term 'born again'; it has connotations, to them, of 'fundie Bible-thumpers' who live in trailer parks, and they loathe such people. They don't understand even the Biblical origin and meaning of 'born again', and now they are co-opting it for their vulgar 'civic religion'?
Lear admits that the name itself, "Born Again American" is an attempt to take back the term "born again" from the Religious Right. He told U.S. News and World Report�s Dan Gilgoff in a Feb. 10 interview that "the intention was to say, 'wait a second. Nobody owns these feelings. And they belong here, too, for those of us who feel that way. But spread the wealth of feeling."
[...]
The campaign�s theme song, also titled "Born Again American" includes lyrics such as:
It�s clear my country�s soul is on the line
She�s hungering for something that she lost along the way
The principle the framers called upon us to obey
That in this land
The people�s will must have the upper hand
I felt the calling once before and took a sacred vow
And faithful to that vow I have remained
I hear the calling once again, my country needs me now
And to her cause I have been re-ordained.''
What meaning can 'sacred' have to someone who does not even believe, truly, in God, or anything above their human wills and reason? None, whatsoever. I find their language to be like a taunting parody of real religion, and I suspect it's meant as such.
And the allusion to the 'people's will' is rather sick-making, given that leftists are generally in opposition to the majority will, behaving as elitists who know better than the ignorant rednecks in flyover land.
But it gets worse: read some of the comments by the cult followers posted on the website, for example this one:
I pledge to make America a place where all are equal and all are respected. President Obama is our salvation and I pray that he is able help Americans recover this country as a global force in right for the world.''
But when Lear invokes 'the Framers' (why not call them Founding Fathers'? Is that too masculine and paternalistic?) I find it hypocritical. Do they really think that the Founding Fathers shared their egalitarian, tower-of-Babel philosophy? Or anything remotely like it? Surely they've never read the writings of the Founders, and even fewer of their blind followers have any clue. Ignorance is a must to be a liberal/leftist.
Let's just look at a few of the actual words of the Founding Fathers. Let's start with some remarks on immigration and foreigners:
My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except for mechanics and particular description of men and professions, there is no use in its encouragement." - George Washington
"I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner among us, except the Marquis de Lafayette, who acts upon different principles from those that govern the rest. These men have no attachment to the country, further than interest binds them." - again, George Washington
"The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency." - Alexander Hamilton
And the 'democracy' that leftists and liberals love to invoke?
''Democracy� wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.'' - John Adams
''...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.'' - James Madison
And Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 'all men are created equal' -- did he intend for that to mean that no differences existed? He said, in Notes on the State of Virginia:
"The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. ... And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? ... The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not that of man?"
On the prospects of 'emancipation' or integration he wrote:
"It will probably be asked, why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? ... ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."
Again, from Notes on the State of Virginia:
"It is not against experience to suppose, that ... varieties of the same species may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?"
So I have to wonder just which 'Framers' these liberals agree with? Quite honestly I don't think these 'born-again patriots' mean what they say; though many rank-and-file leftists and liberals know nothing of what the Founding Fathers thought or wrote, the more educated among them do, and in fact they are fond of attacking the Founding Fathers for being 'racists' and denigrating them as 'dead White males'. They simply want to invoke the names of the Founders to give a veneer of real 'patriotism' or 'Americanism' to their own alien ideas.
I've been extremely wary, lately, of being tagged as a 'patriot' because these days it describes blind followers of the GOP party line, those with a blind allegiance to the apparatus of the federal government and/or symbols like the flag. I have little in common these days with those who are usually called patriots. My allegiance is to the old America, and to the people, not to a flag, a symbol, or a set of 'principles' however high-flown they may be.
And even if I called myself a 'patriot' in the common meaning of the word, I would not want to be classed with these opportunistic wolves-in-sheeps clothing on the Left who are trying to use patriotic symbols in their long march through our hollowed-out institutions.
Raise the Stars and Stripes High
Patriotism is cool again. Some would say patriotism, defined as "love of one�s country," never goes out of style. But to the Left, it�s clearly not an unconditional love. Narcissistic liberals demand a country in their own image.
Still, it�s good to see so many of the nation�s cultural and entertainment elite waving the flag. Hollywood producer and People for the American Way founder Norman Lear is a perfect example. Lear is so moved by the spirit of patriotism these days that he created a campaign focused on being a "Born Again American."
Unfortunately, liberals like Lear are so out of practice with patriotism that they seem to have adopted it as a surrogate spirituality, or confused it with a very un-American cult of personality.
Hope and Change
Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor, argued in a Feb. 8 Washington Post article that it�s President Barack Obama who has revived patriotism. "Barack Obama�s rise to power, has, to many people�s surprise, once again made patriotism a liberal faith." Kazin pointed out, "since liberals turned against the war in Vietnam 40 years go, they have struggled to prove that they love their country even while opposing most of the policies of its government" and they just now "have finally realized that they cannot lead America if America does not hold a privileged place in their hearts."
Yes, I've long noticed that the left's commitment to certain principles vacillates. I've noticed a conspicuous silence on the part of the usual suspects in response to the news of the administration's 'surge' in Afghanistan. What happened to their lofty antiwar principles? Are they going to be devout hawks now that one of their fellow believers is commander-in-chief? So far it looks that way.
When Bill Clinton was inaugurated, I remember a story that appeared in Newsday, about how a group of celebrity Clinton supporters at the inauguration were muttering curses when military jets flew over the ceremony; what an outrage that those evil military jets would break the sacred peace of Clinton's swearing-in. But then, the story goes, one of the celebs said 'but they're OUR jets now!' The reaction was high fives all the way around. Suddenly those malevolent jet planes were all right.
And now, apparently, 'AmeriKKKa' is worthy of the left's respect because of a change in administrations. So it seems that their loyalties to America go as far as loyalty to a personality and specifically to a personality who shares their ideology.
So excuse me if I don't tear up over their touching conversion to being 'patriots.'
The Revival of "Civic Religion"
Apparently, it took Obama�s election to rouse Norman Lear�s affection for his country. Lear is an unabashed Obama supporter. Records show Lear gave over $33,000 to Obama�s campaign, as well as an additional $50,000 toward the inauguration.
A June 6, 2008 Los Angeles Times article reported, "[Hollywood�s] elder statesman, Norman Lear, declared Obama's victory Tuesday night as 'another giant step for mankind.� (Through his group, Declare Yourself, Lear has been busy signing up young voters who seem eager to turn out for the presumptive Democratic nominee.)"
Lear refused to tell New York Times reporters Brooks Barnes and Rebecca Cathcart which nominee he supported in the 2008 general election, but in their Aug. 13 article they noted, "Still, his choice seems clear. Prominently displayed in his office during an interview was a yarmulke decorated with a campaign sticker for Senator Obama."
Wait a minute: isn't Norman Lear the guy who is always trying to stamp out religion in the public square? Hasn't he essentially devoted his life and his fortunes to agitation to remove Christianity from all public observances, and to "separate church and state''? Now, however, we are suddenly talking about 'civil religion.' What's wrong with this picture?
In case some of you have (blessedly) forgotten Lear, he was the force behind the onslaught of PC propaganda on television, starting with 'All In the Family', originally an American version of a British comedy called 'Till Death Do Us Part.' I don't know how much of the blame, therefore, belongs to Lear and his writers and how much to the originators of the British series, but Lear's politically correct 'comedies' dominated American TV for the entire decade of the 1970s and into the 80s. The image of the ignorant WASP bigot, Archie Bunker, became a stereotype of dimwitted 'right-wingers' which has persisted on the left even to this day. The fact that a real-life urban blue-collar worker would be far, far more likely to be a lockstep Democrat party-line voter made no difference to Lear and the writers. The idea was to smear old-stock Americans. And it seemed to have worked.
So, after decades of spitting in the eye of old America and the average White Christian American, liberals and leftists are suddenly 'into' patriotism? It sounds opportunistic to me. They simply want to claim 'patriotism' and thus find a phony moral perch from which to condemn everybody who doesn't fall in line behind Dear Leader.
But back to Lear's cult, I mean, 'civic religion':
At last year�s progressive Take Back America conference Lear spoke of a "civil religion." He told the audience
The phrase "civil religion" is not intended to encourage a form of national self-worship. Just the opposite. The nation wants to be subordinate to its ethical principles as presented in its founding documents � documents that guarantee freedom, due process, equal opportunity and equal justice under the law, ideals the founders pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to secure.
Yet, language used on the "Born Again American" site, in its theme song and by Lear, suggests the opposite.
Lear told Arianna Huffington, founder of the liberal Huffington Post, that Election Night 2008 was his "christening as a born again American."
I find this to be a thumb in the eye to real 'born-again' Christian believers. Every non-believer and even liberal Christians, in my experience, sneer at the term 'born again'; it has connotations, to them, of 'fundie Bible-thumpers' who live in trailer parks, and they loathe such people. They don't understand even the Biblical origin and meaning of 'born again', and now they are co-opting it for their vulgar 'civic religion'?
Lear admits that the name itself, "Born Again American" is an attempt to take back the term "born again" from the Religious Right. He told U.S. News and World Report�s Dan Gilgoff in a Feb. 10 interview that "the intention was to say, 'wait a second. Nobody owns these feelings. And they belong here, too, for those of us who feel that way. But spread the wealth of feeling."
[...]
The campaign�s theme song, also titled "Born Again American" includes lyrics such as:
It�s clear my country�s soul is on the line
She�s hungering for something that she lost along the way
The principle the framers called upon us to obey
That in this land
The people�s will must have the upper hand
I felt the calling once before and took a sacred vow
And faithful to that vow I have remained
I hear the calling once again, my country needs me now
And to her cause I have been re-ordained.''
What meaning can 'sacred' have to someone who does not even believe, truly, in God, or anything above their human wills and reason? None, whatsoever. I find their language to be like a taunting parody of real religion, and I suspect it's meant as such.
And the allusion to the 'people's will' is rather sick-making, given that leftists are generally in opposition to the majority will, behaving as elitists who know better than the ignorant rednecks in flyover land.
But it gets worse: read some of the comments by the cult followers posted on the website, for example this one:
I pledge to make America a place where all are equal and all are respected. President Obama is our salvation and I pray that he is able help Americans recover this country as a global force in right for the world.''
But when Lear invokes 'the Framers' (why not call them Founding Fathers'? Is that too masculine and paternalistic?) I find it hypocritical. Do they really think that the Founding Fathers shared their egalitarian, tower-of-Babel philosophy? Or anything remotely like it? Surely they've never read the writings of the Founders, and even fewer of their blind followers have any clue. Ignorance is a must to be a liberal/leftist.
Let's just look at a few of the actual words of the Founding Fathers. Let's start with some remarks on immigration and foreigners:
My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except for mechanics and particular description of men and professions, there is no use in its encouragement." - George Washington
"I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner among us, except the Marquis de Lafayette, who acts upon different principles from those that govern the rest. These men have no attachment to the country, further than interest binds them." - again, George Washington
"The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency." - Alexander Hamilton
And the 'democracy' that leftists and liberals love to invoke?
''Democracy� wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.'' - John Adams
''...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.'' - James Madison
And Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 'all men are created equal' -- did he intend for that to mean that no differences existed? He said, in Notes on the State of Virginia:
"The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. ... And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? ... The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not that of man?"
On the prospects of 'emancipation' or integration he wrote:
"It will probably be asked, why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? ... ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."
Again, from Notes on the State of Virginia:
"It is not against experience to suppose, that ... varieties of the same species may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?"
So I have to wonder just which 'Framers' these liberals agree with? Quite honestly I don't think these 'born-again patriots' mean what they say; though many rank-and-file leftists and liberals know nothing of what the Founding Fathers thought or wrote, the more educated among them do, and in fact they are fond of attacking the Founding Fathers for being 'racists' and denigrating them as 'dead White males'. They simply want to invoke the names of the Founders to give a veneer of real 'patriotism' or 'Americanism' to their own alien ideas.
I've been extremely wary, lately, of being tagged as a 'patriot' because these days it describes blind followers of the GOP party line, those with a blind allegiance to the apparatus of the federal government and/or symbols like the flag. I have little in common these days with those who are usually called patriots. My allegiance is to the old America, and to the people, not to a flag, a symbol, or a set of 'principles' however high-flown they may be.
And even if I called myself a 'patriot' in the common meaning of the word, I would not want to be classed with these opportunistic wolves-in-sheeps clothing on the Left who are trying to use patriotic symbols in their long march through our hollowed-out institutions.
Labels: Refuge, Scoundrels