A NEW DEVELOPMENT IN MY THINKING ABOUT RGC

Many people seem to think my ideas never change and I just write the same thing over and over. They would be right. However, I have had a new development. I don't know how this happened, but I have realized something.

In terms of checks and balances, all the power should not belong to straight white Christian males. Now, isn't that something? Isn't that a huge improvement? In fact, I've never thought that all the power should be in any one group's hands. There should be checks and balances in terms of who controls power. This is why I found slavery objectionable, and why I find that every group should have the capacity to be educated.

Among the blacks, I do think it's salutary that Condoleeza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Justice Thomas, and other blacks have power, and that they are on the side of black people. But it's good that they are conservative, because only conservatives WANT other groups to have power. So-called liberals pretend they do (freedom of speech until they control it), but it's a ruse.

The war on women that the feminists claim to experience, is actually a war on men. The war on choice, is actually a war on the unborn. We have to be very careful to determine how different groups have cover stories, and what their secretive agenda underneath that agenda reveals.

While I do think it's important that there be women philosophers such as Ayn Rand, Hannah Arendt, and Martha Nussbaum, I do not think they should get to own philosophy. I want checks and balances. This is what's missing now in American academia.

Who will stand with me for universal rights? Only the neo-conservatives.

The so-called liberals want an extremely parochial war against straight white American Christian males in order to destroy them and take all power unto themselves. The only legitimate arguments against this are coming from Jewish men. French Jewish men to be particular: the Nouveau Philosophes, to be specific: Bernard Henri-Levy, Andre Glucksmann, Alain Finkelkraut, and perhaps especially Pascal Bruckner.

Bruckner writes, "And although there remain many dark areas in its history, Rome, like most of the Protestant and Orthodox churches, has begun a courageous critical inventory to bring itself into conformity with the spirit of the New Testament.  There are mosques in Rome, but are there christian churches in Mecca, Jeddah, or riyadh?  Isn't it better to be muslim in Dusseldorf or Paris than christian in Cairo or Karachi?  One would like the various European Communist parties, little Leninist groups, Trotskyites, alter-globalists, and ecologists to take a look at themselves and engage in introspection with the same intransigence.  But it is always from Christianity and from it alone that repentence is expected, because it invented repentence in its modern forms" (Bruckner 44-45).

On this side of the Atlantic I appear to be almost alone in terms of speaking up against the new Marxist tyrannies and yet understanding thoroughly the postmodern push, and being well-acquainted with the avant-garde in poetry and art from surrealism forwards. Most of those on this side of the Atlantic who are against Marxism are dyed in the wool Christians who have never cared much for the surrealists or the Beats. That is where I began, but I am the only one to have broken ranks. (Along with Kerouac, whose final works along these lines have undergone so much damage control it's almost impossible to find them.  Even his letters from his later ten years are not published: where are his letters to William F. Buckley?  If I were a publisher I'd start there.)  We do have a handful of intransigent neo-con Jews like Podhoretz and Horowitz but I wish they had a better understanding of the power of postmodernism so they could help me find its Achilles heel. They fight straw men of their own making.

Were it not for the blog world I would be silenced as well. So where are my allies? It's the Nouveau Philosophes. Right now I'm reading The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, by Pascal Bruckner (Princeton UP, 2010). I recommend this book. Bruckner (a French Jew) argues that the west has turned against itself, and against Israel, in order to be multicultural, and that Marxists are so intent on showing the west as degraded and mentally ill that they will not look at all at what the Islamists are doing to the Christian peoples of the Darfur. It's not within their rubric to do so.

Bruckner writes, "Whatever those disillusioned with progess may think, the collective education of the human race, as it was conceived in the eighteenth century by German dramatist Lessing, is not an empty expression" (45).

On this side of the Atlantic I look at what happened to George Zimmerman. The left turned him into an honorary white man, or bogeyman, redid his words (NBC) in order to paint him as a racist, and then railroaded him into prison. Even though he's actually black, he had to be white, in order to provide a scapegoat for the communist left. (His grandfather is African Peruvian.)  By the time truth gets its pants on, everyone will have forgotten, and the left media will have eviscerated yet another victim and spit him out, only to move on to yet another.  

We are in the midst of a strange and terrifying denunciation. America and the west are evil. Therefore everyone else must be good. So the left cannot hear the cry of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And this means that in order to destroy white American men, they are willing to destroy black African women. They will not listen to the complaints of Sarajevo, so they sign on with Milosevich. Mugabe is excused in Zimbabwe, as Castro is excused in Cuba, as Idi Amin is forgotten in Uganda, and the genocide in Rwanda is blamed on the French, because multiculturals are never evil, and always good. America is the rogue state because Ward Churchill claimed that we distributed smallpox blankets to Native Americans. While I do think there must be checks and balances (and the pecadillos of the west must be exhumed but not exclusively) and there must be pockets of power that belong to other groups, I also believe that we must continue to push western ideals of democracy and human rights and that other countries should not be excused for not living up to these ideals. We need a new universalism, and this universalism must not have easy scapegoats that prevent us from thinking globally, while eating lo-cal.

WHAT ARE AMERICANS?

The French whites are the ones who left their families behind in Europe to explore the New World, but they were planning to return rich. The Pilgrims came with their families intact with an intention to stay. The southern Aristocrats came with huge plantations intact and a sense of entitlement. But what of all the others? The Poles came out of desperation, the Norwegians came out of desperation, the Irish came out of desperation, the Italians came out of desperation. The blacks were forced to come, and if they formed into families were often torn asunder, and sold separately. The Asians came without women for the first decades. It's a tapestry of sorrow united only by the notion of hope for change. But what kind of hope for what kind of change? It's the hope for change spelled out in the Bill of Rights. The ability to speak and worship, and to carry guns, and to have a government with limited rights. The Bill of Rights remains our Palladion (this is the statue sacred to the Trojans -- if it remained in Troy the city could never fall).

LYME CELEBRITIES CROSS RGC LINES: HURRAY FOR LYME!

What do two Democratic activitists, a former Republican president, a black female and an Asian-American writer have in common? You may have guessed it from the title: LYME disease. While the disease is itself not widely celebrated and is not exactly a cause celebre, there are some indications that awareness of the truculent equal opportunity tick-borne pathogen may be growing. First off, almost 1% of Americans have it. (So far, there have been no protests by the 99% who have not been chosen by the pest as worthy of Occupation, but we feel that that too will change as more celebrities come down with the condition.) Lyme has much to recommend it. First of all, it has seemingly no sense of discrimination. Whether it's a Democratic activist such as Alec Baldwin or Christie Brinkley, or whether it's a former Republican president such as George W. Bush, Lyme will hobnob and party down, completely unconcerned about how this independence looks to political insiders. It will strike down the poor with the rich, the black with the white, the men with the women, the children with the elderly, and will even cross that most severe line of political apartheid, that which divides Democrats and Republicans. Lyme loves all alike, and thus could be said to be the first truly Christian disease, making no demographic distinctions, and showing no political preference, and turning a blind eye to privilege or penury. All hail Lyme! Has anyone heard of a more Democratically inclined disease? It's virtually a model of the American ideal, and the flag for which it stands. I look forward to the day when all of America has Lyme, and we are united in our efforts to spread it evenly around the world. For more, read here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/celebrities-with-lyme-disease

INEQUALITY

I took an IQ test from the MENSA foundation this week between tasks at work. I had twenty minutes I didn't know how to fill. I was able to answer 24 of the 30 questions correctly. Three of the questions I got wrong required a higher knowledge of mathematics than I currently possess (one sequence of numbers had to do with prime numbers, and another had to do with cubed numbers, for example). If you worked with this kind of numerical thinking, the questions would have been a piece of cake. By far the easier for me (almost like birdbrain questions) were the verbals analogies, which take me less than a second. Definitions of words also took me less than a second. So to some extent the test had to do with what do you work with on a daily basis? In my case, it's words. Another area of difficulty for me was spatial analogies. They give you a sequence of pictures and the pictures were so ugly I couldn't look at them long enough to find the pattern. But I still had an IQ in excess of 135 according to the readout. This put me in the top 2% of the American population. So then I googled information on intelligence quotients. The criticism of this idea says that reducing intelligence to a single number may not be possible. And of course there's the infamous Bell Curve of Charles Murray. Murray argued that IQ was the primary determinant of who would have an out-of-wedlock baby, and who would make substantial money, among other incendiary outcomes (some said the text was just a way to yell the n. word while hiding behind the facade of science). Other scientists agreed with Murray (50 IQ specialists signed an article in WSJ in support of Murray's work). Could inequality be a matter of IQ? Murray himself said that only 40-80% of intelligence was inheritable, and that the rest of this was environment. "The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic; however, they wrote in chapter 13: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences." The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved." (from Wikipedia on Charles Murray) Is it possible that IQ does measure something important? I looked up Barack Obama's IQ and there is no such score. So the leftists said he had an IQ in excess of 165. Several rightwing sites suggested he had an IQ of about 116. There are no standardized test scores for Barack Obama. We don't even know his SAT scores. They've never been released. Bill O'Reilly's was 1585 (out of a possible 1600) while Bill Gates had 1600. Al Gore had a score of 850. How accurate are these scores compared to a valid IQ test? What in fact is an IQ test? Does IQ measure morality, or fashion sense or business ability or the ability to get things mostly right? In the Sopranos show, Tony Soprano (a fictional character with a penchant for lies) said that he had an IQ of 140. It seems to me that IQ measures a certain kind of mathematical intelligence. Women score lower than men (their average is 100 compared to men's 104). At the highest levels above 125 men are more than twice as likely to be found. But then there are all kinds of anomalies: black men with stratospheric IQs do exist, as there are women with stratospheric IQs. Against this measurement which yields ineqality, we find in ACTS 4:34 the sense that we should all pool our resources. Two people who don't give their all to the pot drop dead on the spot, apparently murdered by God for not pitching in. Are we permitted and even designed for inequality, or for equality? Republicans seem to be more realistic on this. They argue that different cultures are good or bad. They argue that some people are dummies and some are smarties. Democrats argue on the other hand that all cultures are equal (even when they aren't) and that all people are equal (even when they aren't). I personally like competition. I couldn't stand watching sports if the score always came out a tie. I want to see one side win and the other lose and to draw conclusions. When Maverick star Dirk Nowitzki came out in last year's NBA championship with a 102 degree fever and nevertheless started to drop rainbow jumpers to lead his team to the championship over the hapless Heat, I thought it was German work ethic that had triumphed. It wasn't sheer athleticism. That belonged to LeBron James. So what was it? An argument that came out at the time (I think in sports Illustrated) argued that cooperation as manifested by fist bumps and pats on the back distinguished winning teams and found that the Mavericks were far more likely to slap five and exchange chest bumps than the Heat, which was wanting in this category. This argument argued therefore that cooperation was an aspect of Social Darwinism (which is exactly what the anarchist Peter Kropotkin had argued in the 1880s). I find competition brings out the best in a person, but also the worst. I got involved watching the Knicks this season because of Linmania. I found it funny that some of my black students didn't think he was really all that good, and cited the fact that when he was up against Derek Rose of the Chicago Bulls, he would get blown out by his lack of athleticism. His courageous passing and his clever use of lobs was not enough when he was up against a first-class point guard who could outrun him in terms of sheer speed and strength. It seems they saw something that I didn't. Lin revels when he's playing against an older point guard who's still good but not great. Against the greats, he looks terrible. I still like the greater than sign. I'm not willing to abandon it, and to say that all are equal. In certain key ways, we are quite inequal, and this difference is fascinating. The communists try to elide it, but can't. Capitalism capitalizes on it. But what if cooperation -- the ability to deal well with other people and to see things from their perspective, is a key aspect of Social Darwinism? Mitt Romney speaks two languages in addition to English: French and Spanish.

MARXISM AND/AS SMALLPOX

(Painting is Louis-Leopold Boilly's The Vaccination, from 1807.)

It occurred to me that an idea could be like a virus, and sicken all those who come in contact with it. "Ideas have consequences." If Marxism is as horrible as I think it is, could it be as horrible as smallpox? Could there also be a vaccination of sorts for such terrible ideas?

According to Wikipedia, "Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century.[10][11][12] As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.[13]"

Smallpox has now been eradicated (the last known case was in Somalia in 1977). There is still no known cure for it, but you can be insulated from it via cowpox, a lesser form of the disease. If you've had cowpox, you are then immune to smallpox.

After the discovery of this immunization, smallpox disappeared. It was thought to kill about 500,000 people a year in the latter part of the 18th century. One of ten Swedes succumbed to it at that time.

Marxism on the other hand is quite recent but has gotten lots of people killed. Estimates vary from 80 million in China to about 40 million in Russia. About a third of the population died from it in Cambodia. In most countries, what's worse, is that it takes out the most well-educated and functional part of the population, leaving only losers and whiners. It can thus decapitate a country in order to decapacitate it.

How is it transmitted? Orally, or via the written word.

Who is most susceptible? It seems to strike in all countries with the exception of largely Protestant countries. Protestantism appears to offer an immunization, but this immunization is at present little-understood. Some think it is the work ethic, and some think it is the sense of individualism that Protestantism offers.

Marxism mutates and can call itself "liberation theology," or even "liberal humanism." It feasts most heavily on secularized societies and groups.

In its worst cases, such as in North Korea (North Korea was secular and never adopted any religious faith), it can completely take over a country. In order for it to thrive, it closes the borders, and allows no other ideas to compete with it. It seems to be like the creatures in the film Aliens. It is always looking for new hosts. It may be a form of demonic possession.

Catholics are susceptible to it for unknown reasons. But not all Catholics. Again, this seeming immunization on the part of certain Catholics is little understood.

Marxism is tricky because it speaks in the name of equality, and therefore appears to mimic a healthy set of ideas inside of democracies. However, unlike democracy, Marxism does not allow for freedom of speech or private property. Instead it denies these as part of the totalizing power it must have in order to inculcate itself among a host population.

At present United States colleges and universites are official incubation centers. All students in the United States are therefore exposed to it in some form. Once exposed, people can get a full case which amounts to becoming a kind of walking dead. All that one then does is try to attract other adherents. One of the first symptoms is that all humor as fellowship disappears. Work ethic disappears. People who were once functional expect to be supported by the government and will do anything to turn their countries into one-party states dominated by Marxist overlords. There is also a rabid hatred of others who appear to maintain a work ethic.

There are no known remedies. The only known vaccination is Protestantism, and even this is only partial.

I see America as at a critical juncture with regard to Marxism. While we are a capitalist country, and private property is still a right, as is the right of freedom of speech, these are increasingly questioned, especially from within the Democratic party. Redistribution of property with the Democratic party as having the right to seize and redistribute is still at the rumor stage (Joe the Plumber's interaction with the president), while political correctness still has many doubters (Fox, WSJ, being among the most prominent).

But there is a growing trend to look toward Marxism as the source of truth. This trend is most prominent within feminist circles (whose avatar, Simone de Beauvoir, heralded the Maoist revolution within China as a positive development, and whose secondary avatar -- Julia Kristeva -- did likewise). The rise of Marxist superstars such as Michel Foucault within the academic world indicates an increasing reliance upon a divisive and murderous discourse that effectively has no remedy within the academy (the only holdouts being Protestants who are forbidden to speak within the academies due to the separation of church and state).

Still, Catholics are beginning to mount a comeback, and perhaps a united front among the churchgoing will still save the work ethic, the notion of a career, and the idea that we serve our country, and not vice versa. The notions of free trade and equality and quality may yet mount a comeback. At this point, these ideas have been pushed to the wall and are considered radical and outdated by oppressive and increasingly rabid progressives.

As at Tianamen Square, the tanks are beginning to close down any last site of dissidence. If we cannot destroy Marxism, Marxism will destroy us, just as it has destroyed every society where it has reached critical mass.

Ludwig Von Mises, in the epigraph to his book LIBERTY AND PROPERTY (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2009), writes, "...the policies of individualism and of capitalism, its application to economic matters, do not need any apologists or propagandists. The achievements speak for themselves."

While I agree that if we were to look at the fruit of Marxist or capitalist ideas (comparing North to South Korea for instance) the results would be obvious, I nevertheless think it's important for us all to not only understand the rationale behind capitalism, but to help private property and the right to disagree to continue to exist. These are extremely important rights, and to my mind they aren't simply rational. Ideas come out of groundworks. Capitalism arises from the Protestant Reformation where it found its rationale and which helped it grow. Mises does not respect Christianity and occludes the necessity of Protestantism to the rise of capitalism. We need to go back into that grounding founding and to understand the formation of the work ethic, the notions of responsible capitalism, and to understand the notions of freedom of information and democracy that grew up out of that seedbed. The alternatives are awful to contemplate, but those alternatives are now growing everywhere around us, and are threatening to emerge even from within the president's head, as an alien and destructive set of principles for which we must immediately find any and every remedy. We must seek allies among the Catholics and other faith groups: whether it be Hindus (who have their own mercantile traditions and who seem to be impervious to Marxism), and also to any other group that relies on free trade of ideas and goods as part of their success (the Japanese, and even the Canadians, would seem to be part of this).

GOVERNMENTAL CYCLOPS

I don't understand why anyone would venture out to be an entrepreneur these days. While it seems crazy that in some countries you can pay a worker 2 dollars a day (Haiti, or China) and give them no bathroom breaks and make them work fourteen hours a day, our own country has so many requirements and workplace oversights that it would be so scary to deal with them that I can't imagine why anyone dares to attempt it. If you did you'd need a battery of brilliant lawyers working full-time.

James Bovard is a libertarian who wrote in WSJ last week an article entitled "The Wrong way to Help the Disabled."

In essence, he says, " A 7% hiring quota for government contractors is unfair and unwise."

While the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has put a new "notice" into the Federal Register that is "53,000 convoluted words" in length, "A deluge of record-keeping requirements will provide plenty of rope to hang contractors" (Monday April 9, 2012, p. A15).

The article is here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281840611106300.html

You can't just hire a bunch of people in one area to be disabled (your janitors, for instance) but must have 7% in every area. There are 200,000 contractors who must bend to this "Draconian" new law. You need 7% of your head office people to be disabled. "Disabled" can mean anything from can't read to depressed. The definition continues to grow by leaps and bounds. In Puerto Rico, you can buy a "disabled" status from any of various corrupt agencies that specialize in selling this designation, and which entitle you to receive free checks. But in continental America, the situation is just as strange:

"The agency punished Jack Kelley Trucking Firm in Amarillo, Texas, for refusing to hire a man who suffered from uncontrollable epileptic seizures to drive a truck full of hazardous waste."

It seems that while the government protects certain individuals, there is an overall sense that they threaten all the rest of us by doing so.

What happened to checks and balances? Who can push back against these gigantic agencies? Bovard writes, "Most companies, fearing retaliation, were afraid to talk about their clashes with OFCCP."

While our jobs continue to flee overseas to countries with little or no oversight, and where the contractors are king, here in the US contractors must suffer through draconian public agencies that threaten them with a variety of vague laws pursued by increasingly sectarian and political departments. What is the answer to this?

On the one side libertarians like Bovard want to dismantle all protections and let the market rule. On the other side are public agencies that want to govern down to the finest detail any and every entreprenurial activity.

"In 1994, for example, the agency debarred Kentucky's Commonwealth Aluminum Corp. in Lewisville, KY., from federal contracts for refusing to hire applicants with serious back injuries and hernias for heavy-lifting jobs."

It may seem that we shouldn't care about this, because it's federal money, and not ours. However, the increasingly high cost of the government is something that we and our grandchildren are paying for. This is our money, and it's supposed to be our government. The 16 trillion dollar deficit is driven by the increasingly difficult and complex business environment, as well as the lack of taxes that comes from jobs moving overseas. Clothing for instance used to made in this country as recently as ten years ago (35%). Now we're closer to 2%.

Obviously, the environment for business has worsened and regulations have gotten far more complex. Once Obamacare kicks in, Obama will claim this is for all of us, but it's going to raise the debt by a trillion dollars per year. This is something that we are paying for. Obama isn't paying for it out of his pocket, but out of our pocket. Obama and his minions claim that this will force everyone to pay their fair share, but the amount of unpaid healthcare every year is only 35 billion, while the debt will go up by one trillion annually. Therefore, this is merely government overreach. Originally they intended to provide penal time for anyone who didn't have the mandated insurance, and were going to hire 16,000 new IRS agents to police us. Why are we paying the government to police us and imprison us for a law that the majority of people didn't want when it was put in, and still don't want now, and which was only passed in the middle of night, when only criminals were still awake?

Can anything be done to return to checks and balances? What is the answer for the incessant ballooning and Cyclopseanization of the federal government?

I do think it's right that disabled people are treated with dignity (the photo above is from a Chinese sweatshop in which disabled SLAVES are made to work) and in which there are governmental protections. But who is to protect us from the government itself once our federal government has the stature and power of the Red Chinese government (where it seems to be heading)?

RECOGNITION SCENES: A CONTEST

I participated in an ending contest where you write the last 70 words of a novel. My entry, which is a finalist, is this:

"Tent Poles in the Dusk

We had worn toupees in teepees with maudlin amusement. There was nothing left that morning but torn deerskin and cigarettes extinguished in pale pitchers of Bud. We had lived to see the lust of the Mohicans."

You can see more here:

http://thescentofanending.com/page14.html

The contest is still open, so there is time to apply.

It cost six dollars and some change to apply, and the total for the winner is about 83 dollars. It's a joke, and the endings themselves are supposed to be bad: the idea is to relax and write something awful and the worst ending wins.

This gave me the idea for a contest of our own. Many people have done first and last lines of novels, but what about RECOGNITION SCENES? This is the part of a novel where the protagonist moves from ignorance to knowledge (in Oedipus it's where he discovers that he killed his dad and married his mom and that his four kids are the result of incest!).

This time, the WORST one wins, to be determined on April 20th, with each entrant getting ONE VOTE.

And you can't vote for yourself!

Here's my recognition scene, from BUTTERFLY TATTOO:

"As she watched her uncle's sleeve ride up his wrist as he reached for his toast, she saw the butterfly tattoo. It was just as the one known survivor had described it: pink, with a green border, and feet like tiny basketballs. It was exactly two and a half inches across, and done by a competent tattoo artist. She reeled in horror! Stabbing music went through her forehead! However, because she didn't want her uncle to know what she knew (she knew now that he was the one) she spread jam across her own toast, and asked her uncle how things were going down at the postal service."

Entries should be kept to less than one hundred words.

LUCK AND FATE

Reading ancient Greek myth the role of fate seems paramount. Oedipus had a fate waiting for him: he would kill his dad and marry his mom.

Today we would call it bad luck.

I believe in luck, although I don't think the Calvinists by definition do (due to predestination).

Pilate had bad luck. Pharoah had bad luck. But when we come to Jesus, he appears to be in control of his destiny, or his destiny appears to be in control of him. Maybe that was also true for Pilate, Pharoah, and Judas.

We went to a different church today (Episcopalian) where the singer (Johanna Arnold) was a powerful opera singer. There is a lovely painting in there by Lorenzetti. And afterwards we stayed for refreshments. I had a sandwich that was delicious while talking with an 85-year old man about his life which seemed to be composed of lucky meetings: his boss who hired him for forty years. His wife who married him for 65 years. His growing up in the small dale in which the church resided. But he accepted his luck as if it was his fate.

WHAT IS MONEY?

I read an article in The Intercollegiate Review by Maria Paganelli called What is Money FOR? She's an economist at Trinity University in Texas and she says it's a stupid question.

The correct question she thinks is WHAT IS MONEY? Money, she claims, is "coined liberty."

This means that if you have it you have freedoms that you otherwise wouldn't have.

Many people might think that money is for the poor, or perhaps to give to the government (render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's). I never really understood why Jesus thought that money BELONGED to Caesar just because his stupid face was on it.

Was Jesus joking around again?

Augustine took Jesus at his word and coined the Two Kingdoms theory out of Christ's response. Luther seems to have taken Augustine at his word and ran to the bank with it.

But I like Paganelli's idea that "Money is coined liberty."

So, if the government takes it away, or inflates it, they are stealing our liberty.

I FIXED SOMETHING

The front door wouldn't close because the wood block at the bottom had come loose from its mooring. It took me two weeks to think about how to fix it. Then, in about a minute, I unscrewed the broken screw from its foundation through the wood, and screwed in a new screw. Two hours later I'm still amazed that I fixed something. The door shuts flush now. There are only about forty other things I need to fix.

COSTLY GAS

Gas cost $1.75 when Obama got into office. It's now $4.75 in NY state (on the Palisades Freeway just outside of the NYC it really did cost that much!). Does it cost more because of inflation, or because of Deepwater Horizon's costs, or because it suddenly ran out because OBama is using so much to jet around, or what is it? Is there a decent alternative to gasoline? It costs a lot more than $4.75 in Europe. Is Obama just trying to make America more like Europe? Is he trying to encourage us to think about alternative sources of energy? Meanwhile he won't allow the pipeline and he doesn't want to drill and won't open up the strategic reserve. I want cheap gas! I want to drive around cheap! If he doesn't give me some cheap gas, I might not vote for him!

NARRATIVES

It occurred to me that many people in the MSM are running the RGC program. They must have been indoctrinated in graduate schools across the country to think that if class can be abolished through redistribution then equality would be the result, and the result of this would be happiness. Then a corollary of this would be equality between the genders, and between the races. So, if sexism and racism was abolished the result would be equality and thus happiness would result, and America would have found the happiness that Jefferson said we should seek. The problem with this is that the economy will collapse if redistribution is the economic program and perfect equality is the end result.

Against this program, you have Fox in the MSM and Wall Street Journal that stick up for the notion that merit should be drive the economy, and justice would be to let those who have merit profit from it. You'd think Fox and the WSJ would be bullied into submission by the sheer and overwhelming number of communist publications and networks, but the hilarity is that Fox and WSJ pull enormous numbers and are in the black while the red stations are so manifold that they have no big share of readers or listeners and have anemic capitalization as a result. NPR survives solely because of government handouts without which they'd join the ranks of the unemployed.

This is the source of the intensity over the Trayvon Martin incident. The MSM desperately hoped they could find a news item that showed that bias still exists. And the president jumped in, too, because his numbers depend on this. The other stations, and the many blogs, wondered if this wasn't another Officer Crowley. We still don't know, but already the debate has splintered because the shooter -- was Hispanic, and apparently was within his rights to stand his ground.

The best-case scenario for the MSM and the president would have been a white male shooter of enormous wealth (gated community was supposed to stand in for wealth) who chased down and shot in cold blood a 12year old boy who had just been whistling showtunes from Annie and eating Skittles. Unfortunately the boy had turned into a man, and was now 6'3 and had according to eye witnesses knocked down Zimmerman with one blow. Zimmerman was trying to protect his neighborhood, and was an altar boy and had never been involved in a similar incident, and cried after everything had taken place.

The narrative began to unravel, very quickly, not years later as in the lacrosse incident at Duke (which took years to unravel) but within hours of the president's piling on, which in turn caused millions nation-wide and internationally to pile on. As they reluctantly got off the pile and began to see the individual underneath the pile it wasn't quite what it seemed. The narrative didn't match. Oops.

But what interests me here is the narrative itself. The notion that RGC are the marching orders of the left, and how they look for incidents to reinforce the notion that the narrative is important and necessary, and thus that they are important and necessary.

Probably everyone is always finding and playing out narratives of various kinds. Against the left narrative is the right narrative which says that family is the basis of functionality or dysfunctionality, and that a good solid family is the basis of decency. And here too the right had initially hoped for a drugged up zombie in Trayvon Martin. But it doesn't quite fit. Trayvon apparently had a father and mother (it seems they are divorced but both are still in the picture). The father continues to care about Trayvon. The drugged up scenario is also missing as he was checked, and he seems to be clean.

Trayvon wrote some vicious tweets but perhaps was just playing about. We still don't know.

What's funny is that this incident falls between the cracks of the great metanarratives now current.

Both sides had hoped for yardage in the political football game we now play between left and right. Both are still hoping for yardage.

But inside of these great narratives are smaller and more local narratives. What was going on in this neighborhood that they had volunteer security guards (not so rich as the left had hoped?). Why didn't the local police do more to identify Trayvon Martin (were they overwhelmed with victims, or just didn't care, as the left alleges?). Huge gaps in our knowledge still exist, and because the case appears to not fit into any of the reigning metanarratives, I suspect we will shortly move on, as there is no yardage to be gleaned. At MSNBC Al Sharpton continues to harp on the incident, but he's always the last to realize that Tawana Brawley lied, and that he looks like a fool. The president has dropped the matter, although perhaps there are still some quiet memos circulating to the effect that they must railroad Zimmerman in order to close the case and establish the perception of justice.

This country is weird. RGC is a form of mutated madness. The other side, the focus on the family side, is somewhat more functional, as is out and out capitalism a la Adam Smith. I really don't know.

I suppose that for me the notion of politics is somewhat distant. I got interested in it only in the last ten years because I saw the MSM pushing Marxism, and it frightened me, and continues to frighten me, as the MSM is very shallow and reactionary, and has pulled a lot of flotsam and jetsam into their wake. Ultimately to make their RGC agenda work they will have to abolish freedom. Freedom of speech is already being eroded at the university level, and in many businesses. And the attack on the few righties remaining (Limbaugh, Fox, Palin, etc.) is turning into an all-out assault. The assault on freedom of the markets is also ongoing with stealthcare as the major push.

How do these enormous narratives get going, and how does an individual or a small movement like LS help to stop them? Or are they like tsunamis and our only hope is to stay out of their way? If Santorum were to win, the left narrative would be destroyed. If Obama wins, it will swamp the economy, and destroy America definitively. If Romney were to win, I have no idea what would happen. I have no idea what he stands for. He wants to be president, but I don't know why.

So what is my role in this? As a tiny blogger with about a half million readers over the last five years (total number) with a group of some twenty commenters, I've realized that it can be fun although dangerous to surf these gigantic waves that roll through. But more and more I have realized that the waves that are whipped up are almost invariably media-created frenzies. When the senator in Arizona was shot the left hoped that it was a rightwing nut who had fired the shots. With the Duke lacrosse incident the left hoped it was white rich males who had raped an innocent. Tawana Brawley. Etc. We have to go back to Rodney King to get an incident that really matched the RGC agenda, and yet even there the violent repercussions in which white truckers were snatched from their vehicles and beaten to death by black mobs destroyed the impression of an innocent and a guilty group. The sentimental Marxist narrative sweeps whole communities away, but relies on a romantic imaginary original scene: the horrible Russian upper class, and the Romanovs, or the Romanian king, or whatever they can find: and yet still the counternarratives surface. And you'd think the MSM would cease and desist. But ideology dies only slowly and meanwhile there are passions to awaken with stories of innocence and guilt, with good and bad, with right and wrong.