Hey!  It’s New Year’s Eve!  So how’s it goin’?  Next year will be bet­ter!  No — really!  OK.  The value of the dol­lar is tank­ing.  The value of being an Amer­i­can is pur­posely being den­i­grated by the head of the coun­try.  Said head is try­ing to impose laws on the coun­try that will assure that, if no one has very much, every­one has the same not so much.  But he’s a pim­ple on the ass of this great republic.

Ah.  The Gloomy Gus men­tioned in the title.  Sur­prise!  It’s not Nolan­im­rod. It’s George Will!  And even he’s man­aged to take a tale of global cat­a­stro­phe and turn it into a mes­sage of hope.

Nev­er­the­less, in 1787 other peo­ple — Amer­i­cans call them the Found­ing Fathers — who were influ­enced by New­ton­ian physics and the deist idea of God as cos­mic clock­maker, devised a con­sti­tu­tional sys­tem of sep­a­rated pow­ers, check­ing and bal­anc­ing one another, mim­ic­k­ing what they con­sid­ered our solar system’s clock­like mechanics.

Today, we know there is a lot of play in the joints of the Con­sti­tu­tion, and that every 40 mil­lion years or so aster­oids of more than half a mile in diam­e­ter strike Earth. Yet the Con­sti­tu­tion still con­sti­tutes, and the fact that flora and fauna have sur­vived Earth’s episodes of extreme vio­lence tes­ti­fies to the extra­or­di­nary imper­a­tive of life.

How’s THAT for a closer?

Happy New Year!

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We can’t afford to rerun the ’90’s.  With the Obama team relent­lessly push­ing its crim­i­nal jus­tice model for deal­ing with ter­ror­ists it’s just a mat­ter of time before we once again, if we don’t already, have Jamie Gorelick’s Wall of Sep­a­ra­tion between the law enforce­ment peo­ple and intel­li­gence operations. From the Hot Air blog:

We tried this before, how­ever, in the 1990s.  It didn’t work out so well.  Oddly enough, Osama bin Laden never appeared in fed­eral court to answer his indict­ment, and the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion declined to have him deliv­ered to US cus­tody because we weren’t sure we could get a con­vic­tion in court.  This approach resulted in an esca­lat­ing series of attacks on US assets around the world dur­ing the 1990s, with hun­dreds of lives lost, and it cul­mi­nated in 9/11.

We just can’t afford another decade of play­ing Let’s Pre­tend.  How often is there a piece in the news where the source is “speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymity because he is not per­mit­ted to dis­cuss this” or some­thing like that? Daily?  So the guy is vio­lat­ing the terms of his employ­ment and betray­ing his employer (who is, in most cases, the Amer­i­can peo­ple) and telling the press (and any­body else who wishes to lis­ten in) things he isn’t sup­posed to.

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I don’t know how else to describe it, so I have to turn to Yeats.  This is a night­mare.  These are ele­men­tary school chil­dren being described here.

[The younger stu­dent] claimed she suf­fered emo­tional trauma because she was sub­jected to racial and sex­ual slurs at … ele­men­tary school … Despite com­plaints, school admin­is­tra­tive staff and dis­trict offi­cials allowed the abuse to “esca­late to the point where [she] was phys­i­cally threat­ened, assaulted and bat­tered,” the suit alleged.

Racial and sex­ual slurs.

Threat­ened, assaulted and bat­tered.

This goes beyond any­thing in Lord of the Flies.  In an ele­men­tary school while teach­ers were present.  Has the bur­den of behav­ing like respon­si­ble adults and rais­ing chil­dren become so over­whelm­ing that the col­lec­tive WE, with a shrug of the shoul­ders in acknowl­edge­ment that we can do noth­ing about it, slouch to a place out of sight, out of hear­ing, and wish only to be left alone?

The Sec­ond Com­ing by W.B. Yeats

Turn­ing and turn­ing in the widen­ing gyre
The fal­con can­not hear the fal­coner;
Things fall apart; the cen­tre can­not hold;
Mere anar­chy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and every­where
The cer­e­mony of inno­cence is drowned;
The best lack all con­vic­tion, while the worst
Are full of pas­sion­ate inten­sity.
Surely some rev­e­la­tion is at hand;
Surely the Sec­ond Com­ing is at hand.
The Sec­ond Com­ing! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spri­tus Mundi
Trou­bles my sight: some­where in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and piti­less as the sun,
Is mov­ing its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shad­ows of the indig­nant desert birds.
The dark­ness drops again; but now I know
That twenty cen­turies of stony sleep
were vexed to night­mare by a rock­ing cra­dle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Beth­le­hem to be born?

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That’s not like The Host­ess with the Most­ess or The Cat in the Hat.  The whole phrase is Throw­ing out the baby with the bath water.

Our soci­ety has made really major improve­ments in the last 40 or 50 years.  The most obvi­ous is the sta­tus, role, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for black peo­ple and that doesn’t require any elab­o­ra­tion other than a peek at the White House.

Another is the sta­tus of and oppor­tu­ni­ties for women.  Back then if a woman wanted to work she pretty much had three choices:  librar­ian, school teacher, or nurse, none of which paid well back then, and they were treated like inden­tured ser­vants.  In a lot of dis­tricts if a woman became preg­nant she had to quit or stand down for the dura­tion.  Not too long before that a nurse had to have the high­est morals and no hus­band.  The morals part she could demon­strate by never going on a date in public.

Another sign that our soci­ety was a lit­tle short of par­adise is evi­denced by the com­ment a painter made to me one day in a New Orleans bar:

When I was younger some of us would pile into a car and go cruis­ing around Tulane look­ing for queers to beat up.

That he no longer thought that was such a grand idea was evi­denced by the fact that he used the anec­dote to illus­trate what a jerk he had been when younger, in a story about how much had changed.

That’s the bath­wa­ter part.  That was some murky, pol­luted bath­wa­ter and our soci­ety is the bet­ter for it’s hav­ing been pitched out into the weed patch.

When you wash the baby, make it all clean and fresh-smelling, you want to dis­card the water but you don’t want to throw the baby out into the weed patch, too.  And some­times that hap­pens.

The FCC has decided to change the design of its shirts after the orig­i­nal design, which was sub­mit­ted by stu­dents and voted on by the fresh­man class, sparked out­cry from mem­bers within the gay, les­bian, bisex­ual and trans­gen­der community…

…The orig­i­nal design, which won out over five other entries, dis­played an F. Scott Fitzger­ald quote in the front — “I think of all Har­vard men as sissies” — in bold white let­ters. The back of the long-sleeved, navy blue T-shirt said “WE AGREE” in cap­i­tal let­ters, with “The Game 2009” scrawled in script under­neath it.

[T]he gay, les­bian, bisex­ual and trans­gen­der com­mu­nity.

Whether or not one is gay, or homo­sex­ual, is pretty much a ques­tion of what you like to put, or have put, and where.  I get that.

What I don’t get is how that’s a com­mu­nity.  Nor do I get how this so-called com­mu­nity gets an absolute veto over what the stu­dent body at a col­lege does, right down to dic­tat­ing what they may or may not put on their shirt for The Big Game.

Another thing I don’t get.  Upon occa­sion, dur­ing inti­mate moments, my girl might feel like doing a ride ‘em, cow­girl num­ber and, so to speak, sad­dle up. And per­haps, keep­ing with the same motif, I might like to have a go at stal­lion mode.  And we might find that such activ­ity is what we really like and keeps sparks flying.

But we’re not, based on that, going to form a vot­ing bloc.

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