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Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Walking Through The Winter Miscellany
Normally, your Curmudgeon takes the week between Christmas and New Year's Day as down time -- no work, no writing, no ruminating, no nothing. Well, except for the C.S.O.'s "honey-do" list. However, this year his house is in reasonably good shape, he has no family crises to deal with, and his stack of unread books is reasonably short, so there's new musing material for you.
Lucky you.
1. Exchange Of Shots.
John Gibson, popular FOX News commentator, has been taking fire for his recent book The War On Christmas:
For [his last book], "The War on Christmas," I was especially careful because I knew this would be a touchy subject.But still I never really expected what has actually happened.
With the book, people condemn it without having read it. They have me saying things I didn't say, and call me names for saying things I didn't say.
That has redoubled with the radio. Now I have people calling me names on television. Names like "fathead" and "the worst something or other" for things I really did not say. Or if the words were actually uttered, they were taken wildly out of context.
Qualitatively, this is no surprise. The anti-Christian Left has demonstrated repeatedly that there's no tactic too low for them, if they think it will help them to score. Quantitatively, the volume of denunciation and slander Gibson has received mostly means that no other tactic strikes the Left as likely to be profitable -- largely because Gibson's citations are irrefutable and his conclusions are unavoidable.
The facts are on Gibson's side, as is the logic. All the Left can do is attempt to silence him, whether by intimidation or deceit.
It means we're winning. Be of good cheer.
2. The Kwanzaa Canard.
For decades, the media have given credence to many a self-appointed black “leader,” no matter how outrageous. Now they’re doing the same with a pagan ritual called Kwanzaa, a so-called African-American holiday.A made-up, anti-Christian observance, Kwanzaa is celebrated by blacks who profess Christ. In our politically correct climate, even President George Bush, a believer in Christ, feels obligated to praise this ritual....
Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Dr. Maulana “Ron” Karenga, a former black militant, Marxist and convicted felon. Claiming to have the unity of black people in mind, Karenga committed most of his crimes against blacks.
Just five years after his invention, he was convicted of torturing two black women by stripping them naked, beating them with electrical cords, placing a hot iron into the mouth of one and mangling the toe of the other in a vice. During the ordeal, he forced them to drink detergent.
Lovely fellow, this "Dr." Karenga. What was his doctorate in, your Curmudgeon wonders? The philosophy and practices of the Marquis de Sade? But let's not stray too far from the point. A couple of years ago, Ann Coulter gave us this notable addition to Karenga's biography:
It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.In what was probably ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the '60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Karenga's United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American '60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.
Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the '60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution. Those were the precepts of Karenga's United Slaves. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, blowing away Black Panthers and adopting invented "African" names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named "Jamal" currently sit on death row?)
Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear. Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the "framed" murder of two whites included: "the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department" and so on. (He further noted that "the evidence was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt" – an interesting standard of proof.) Karenga should know about FBI infiltration.
In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the '70s, Karenga was quick to criticize rumors that black radicals were government-supported. When Nigerian newspapers claimed that some American black radicals were CIA operatives, Karenga leapt in to denounce the idea publicly, saying, "Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents."
By now, there is no question that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In one barbarous outburst, Karenga's United Slaves shot Black Panther Al "Bunchy" Carter on the UCLA campus. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.
Bless you, Ann, for saying what so many others would never dream of uttering, no matter how sure they are of their facts.
One of the longstanding obstacles to the radicalization of American blacks has been their devoutness. Most religious blacks -- meaning most blacks -- are members of one or another Christian faith. More, they take their faith seriously; it's an integral part of their lives, not just a Sunday habit. Historically, they who've sought to overturn an existing social order had to demolish its religious supports as a matter of first priority. Karenga might well have intended his Kwanzaa nonsense as a stroke of that sort. That he received any support from any agency of our federal government is shameful. Much that government does is shameful, but this particular episode seems to stand above the rest, even for that bloodily fractious era.
Eternity Road, like LaShawn Barber's Corner, is a No-Kwanzaa Zone.
3. Twenty-First Century Foxes.
In what must be one for the books, your Curmudgeon finds that he must disagree with his perennial hero, Dr. Thomas Sowell:
I don't make a million dollars a year but I think every member of Congress should be paid at least that much. It's not because those turkeys in Washington deserve it. It's because we deserve a lot better people than we have in Congress....There is no point complaining about the ineptness, deception or corruption of government while refusing to do anything to change the incentives and constraints which lead to ineptness, deception and corruption.
You are not going to get the most highly skilled or intelligent people in the country, people with real-world experience, while offering them one-tenth or less of what such people can earn in the private sector....
How many people in the top layer of their respective professions are going to sacrifice the future of their families -- the ability to give their children the best education, the ability to have something to fall back on in case of illness or tragedy, the ability to retire in comfort and with peace of mind -- in order to go into politics?
A few people here and there may be willing to make such sacrifices for the good of the country but, by and large, you get what you pay for. What we are getting as cheap politicians are often a disgrace -- and enormously costly as reckless spenders of the taxpayers' money in order to keep themselves getting re-elected.
In your Curmudgeon's opinion, this misconceives the reason most politicians go into politics in the first place: the desire for power over others, whether they admit that to themselves explicitly, or cloak it under a gauzy, pseudo-altruistic notion of patriotic purpose and public service. This is of a piece with virtually all the rest of human action:
The problem is not that we're failing to bid an adequate amount that would secure us the services of adequately wise and prudent officials; it's that we've failed to grapple successfully with the power of the libido dominandi itself. Friedrich Hayek ably delineated this dynamic in The Road To Serfdom, in the chapter titled "Why the worst get on top."
Let us think of devising filters for power-lust, rather than establishing still one more lure for persons whose agenda is something other than true public service.
Take us the little foxes, the little foxes that trouble our vines: for our vines put forth tender grapes. [Song Of Solomon, 2:15]
Comments
Ann Coulter is often referred to as a right-wing bomb-thrower. Too bad more do not have the courage to hurl the truth-bombs, more often than not with tongue-in-cheek. That she does it impudently, laughing in the faces of the deaf, dumb and blind and evil is why she is hated and why I, too, admire her.
Posted by on 12/28/2005 at 12:18 AM
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