Language

"John Podhoretz once remarked that all conservatives are bilingual: We speak both conservative and liberal. Liberals are monolingual, because they can afford to be."

Just a quick note on this comment. I have been thinking out the language of politics for a while now (in fact I want to write and article on it someday) and one of the things that i have noticed is that conservatives always fight an uphill battle. Because we are a bit more realistic about the world and we believe that there are different solutions to the same problem that will work better for different people, we can't offer simple universal answers. So the liberal gets to say, "free health-care for all," and it sounds great. So great in fact that no argument is needed. they do this in all areas political. A job for every one. Perfect racial ratios in all jobs. Middle class lifestyles no matter how hard you work etc. etc.

The conservative now has a rhetorical hole. Before he can argue that any of these are infeasible or explain how they might lead to the exact opposite of what is promised, he has to explain why he thinks it is bad to cover children who are dying of ingrown toenails because their parents don't have a good enough job. Who can dig themselves out of that hole?

That is what the above quote means, when conservative hear the promises made by the liberal, he is able to translate them into tax increases, loss of freedom and governmental meddling in private life. When the liberal hears the conservative's response on the other hand he only hears how much the conservative hates the down-trodden. Who bears the weight of this responsibility? The Media who has coarsened discourse and stripped the political language of the compassion of non-governing.

Anyway, this issue of the school year came up at that time — we were going to have to study longer to keep up with the Japanese. And Jack Germond said, “I think kids ought to have some fun. I think they ought to go out and play. I think they ought to have a summer.”

I don’t hate education, believe me — but I agree. Totally. And, with the rise of the over-organized kid, the fine art of just hanging around and doing nothing — kicking a stone or whatever — seems to have been lost. Too bad.

I’m sure it’s the bias of my upbringing, but I think school ought to be from about September 6 to about June 6 — and that anything else is perverse. - Jay Nordlinger

I don't know why this struck me but it did. Today on my drive into work I was contemplating the oddity of the last 200 + years in the west. All kinds of things have been bouncing around in my head for the past few days: the empire state building honoring a murderous regime that can only think of humanity in blocks of 100,000 and considers the individual a dangerous aberration, a book called We Are Doomed: Recovering Conservative Pessimism, a bumper sticker proclaiming it is the U.S.’s fault that Cuba is poverty-stricken, the idiocy that is the UN and our participation with it, the history of the Bill of Rights and its expansion beyond all rationality, etc.

All of this gives me a wonderful pessimistic hope. Here we are at the tail end of one of the best moments in human history. Freedom has conquered the west and held it for close to a century, interrupted here and there sure but we have pushed back tyranny and held it from our shores. Allowing for all kinds of advance that never could have happened in any other circumstance. But I can see this all ending, we have given up the fight, and so soon we will lose. Of course it is possible that there might be a Renaissance, Reformation and Great Awakening again and preserve it a bit long but in the end Oppression will win.

Now I am not in some Glenn Beck hyper-panic, and I hope I never am. I can see it ending but there is no reason to believe that humanity is finished and when America perishes, so does all joy and happiness. That is the silliest of all conceits (the one that the west is the most guilty of), believing that anyone that doesn’t live in my circumstances must be miserable. Humans will still have fun, families will still be the source of joy, works of art will still be made (better ones, I believe, on account of the cost that it will take to make them), laughter will still be heard and the world will still offer great beauty that all can enjoy for free.

But there is a price to be paid for the blessing that we have enjoyed. We will be turned into the worst of me, Hallow Men, for a time. Well, not we that are reading this, but our children. They will be the over scheduled, hyper organized, super pampered generation. This is the generational toll.

The great friend of Oppression and enemy of Freedom has always been security. Strong offer it to weak, governments to citizens, companies to consumers in exchange for a bit of freedom. Throughout history this is the great assistant to the tyrants.

Now here is the greatest of all ironies: we don’t have any real security risks in our nation, nothing foreign, economic or military, can touch us, so we invent our risks. Pedophiles are everywhere! Five kids died last year because they weren’t in child seats until age 21! The Germans are better at Math! There are thieves! Etc.

As a result of all these invented fears we kill our children’s freedoms and ours. The kids have to play only in the backyard unless we are there to closely supervise them. Gone are the days of eight years olds riding their bikes to the park and playing with whoever may be there. (A lot of people I know are actually shuddering at the suggestion that is even a possibility in my mind). We sap huge amounts of money and effort to tie the kids in. Gone is the freedom to even change seats during a drive. (I remember playing tag around and over the seats of a suburban my parents owned, I don’t even know if it had seatbelts for us kids). And yearly we hear calls for year-round schooling so our kids can “keep up”. (I will one day write a blog on America’s education). We have given up all of our kids’ freedom for fake security (playing in the backyard protects the kids from alien attacks!) and so they won’t expect any freedoms when they grow up. This is how we lost.

But there is still happiness, kids still sneak out and meet friends from the neighborhood, they still sneak out of their restraints and they still have fun. In the end if we loose America, that will be sad, but fun will still exist perhaps it will exist in greater abundance.

Managment By Walking Around

When I was in undergrad, I used to hang around with a diverse group of people in the union. One of the things that I remember from our discussions is the management style of MBWA (Management By Walking Around). I (not being a business major) have no idea if it is a real strategy, but my business major friend said it was so I will assume it exists. The most famous practitioner of this style is Bill Lumberg from Office Space (the "Yeah..I'm going to need you to work this Saturday (sip form the coffee) if that's ok", guy). Walking around trying to keep people from goofing off and inspire them to work harder.

Now there may be something to say for this but there is an obvious flaw here. If the boss is running around all day, the drones look at him and conclude that he is doing no work. He soon gets the reputation of a lazy man that only got his job because he kissed the right bum and now is surviving by stealing other peoples ides. This reputation only gets worse if, when asked about the work his division is doing the boss seems uninformed and equivocates until he can pass the ball to a subordinate. In the end the boss loses the confidence of those he manages and becomes a joke.


What is happening to President Obama and his presidency is that he uses MBWA. In the last few months during the healthcare debate, before that for the stimulus debate, and for everything else that he wants to manage, he loves to walk around. As far as I can tell in the first eight months of his presidency Obama has spent 5 whole days in D.C. and the Whitehouse. the rest of the time he is running around in Europe, Latin America, or some backwater in the U.S. Every day he gives a speech in these places and tries to inspire new confidence in every one that listens.

When he lands back in D.C. at the end of his trip he goes out to meet his bosses (he got to where he is by kissing the media's bum after all) and answer their questions. But he is wretched in this aspect. He stumbles around, equivocates, tells horrible jokes and then passes the ball to an "expert" from congress. Even when something gets done, like the stimulus bill, he seems to have no idea what it is made up of and at a loss as to how it works.

All of this gives our new President an aura of incompetence. But it is the worst type of incompetence: lazy incompetence. I don't know anyone that would argue that he isn't able to understand these things, or that he couldn't write a bill if he wanted. No, he can, we all know he can. But he seems to prefer his coffee and the freedom to fly around the world when ever he wants to doing real work. This, I think, explains his amazing drop in popularity and the fear the citizens have of his speechifying. Tonight we will hear his speech and a large number are afraid of hearing, "Um...yeah...i'm going to need you (sip of coffee) to give up everything that you think of as medicine...if that's ok...and ummmm...we're going to need you to work a few saturdays to pay for it."

The Blue M&M

A Remembrance

My van went the way of all good machines yesterday, I donated it to charity because I didn’t want to go through the trouble of selling it…in reality I probably couldn’t have gone through with it. If I really had posted an ad I’m sure that I wouldn’t have ever called anyone back. So I called a donation service and it was gone 5 hours later.

I cried a bit, posted a lament to the ol’ blue M&M (the Vanagon’s name) on my facebook, thinking that I might get some nice remembrances of him from friends. What I got instead were a number of people telling me that it is better that he is gone because now I can grow up. I think he deserves better so I will share my eulogy here.

I got Blue M&M, my Vanagon, in 1997 after his predecessor died on the way to Fort Collins during a rugby trip. The predecessor, also a Vanagon, (I forget its name, the only outstanding characteristic it had was a sun roof the size of a backyard pool) wasn’t very good to me, it had spent a large amount of time broken down, and, since I was a poor college student, I had no good road trips with it. But I had fallen in love with driving the buses so I bought ol’ Blue the next month.

He immediately burrowed his way into my heart by having air-conditioning and an engine that could hold 70 mph on most roads. His name, however, was hard to decide on, my friends and I have always named our cars but required a strong event or characteristic to give the name meaning. We called it Ugly, Blue Machine, V II and the Mystery Machine for a while. But none of these seemed right, he always shrugged them off. In 1998 we finally hit on the name that stuck.

I was a member of a group in high school that was facetiously called the “Misogynists” for a while. The name was a joke to most people because the only thing against women we did was not to date. For most of us this was a favor to women but because of our separateness, it was assumed that we had something against women. In college I became the only remaining member of this group. Some had moved away and others fell to temptation and so I had this one remarkable thing that surrounded my otherwise unremarkable person.

The vanagon was brought into this by its talent of breaking down in certain situations. The first time I had a problem with it was just after I had given a girl who was a friend a ride home. The throw-out bearing broke, a minor thing but she tied it directly to the ride I had given her, as a result she called it the Misogyny Mobile. The name became slightly modified shortly thereafter by other friends as blue M&M’s had just been introduced so he became the Blue Misogyny Mobile, the Blue M&M for short.



From that time on he held his reputation as a confirmed woman hater, I had many road trips with the guy but only one made me want to punch his flat nose. I and my old group from high school all got on the same summer project with Campus Crusade in Myrtle Beach SC and I decided to drive out there rather than fly like so many other people did. To my delight there were two other people that wanted to share a ride out there from Colorado. So we all decided that I would pick them up and we would drive together. One of the ride sharers was a delightful young lady named Laurie. Needless to say M&M was not happy. He ran out of gas just outside of Colorado in Kansas. He destroyed his alternator outside of Kansas City. He threw three set of belts between the fixing of the alternator and the end of St. Louis. In the end he got us to SC, but he let us know his anger. At the end of the summer when it was just me and my brother going back he handled it like a champ.

Like all great friends he required investment, but he invested in me back. I had to fix him quite a bit in the 11 years we knew each other, but on his part he never broke down when I couldn’t afford to fix him. It was amazing really. I would be eating my third straight month of macaroni and he would tool along fine. But when I had saved up enough for a bit of a splurge he would drop a clutch or break an exhaust pipe. All in all he was great, if I kept the women from him he would keep me rolling wherever I needed to go.

Blue’s decline started last year. I got a car as a gift that got better gas mileage and so he was parked. We kept up the licenses and the insurance just in case I wanted a romp. I took him out here and there, but I could tell that he was feeling the neglect. His instrument panel started to break apart, and his age began to tell, the years weighing heavy on him. The telling blow came about a year and three months ago when some scoundrel threw a rock and destroyed a window in the rear. I couldn’t afford to repair it for the first time. I knew he understood but it hurt us both any way.

Then the final blow. Added to the ignominy of having to suffer without a full complement of protection of the elements, I further insulted him by driving my wife around as a treat on HER birthday. He had enough and gave up the ghost in the worst possible place: on the 408 in the fast lane with barely any shoulder. This was his final act of spite against the female species, and more particularly the one that had stolen me from my devotion to him. Blue M&M was able in a moment to ruin her birthday and strand us, without cell phones mind you, in the prickliest of situations.

My wife never had been reconciled to Blue and he never reconciled to her. I was stuck in the middle for two years of marriage but in the end he left me. I will not say that it was pure spite against my wife. Rather I know that it was his swan song. In one final effort, knowing he must lose me in the end to the greater pull of my wife, he ended his life in a way that typified and cemented his reputation for all time. He went out like he wanted to and that is a relief to me.

I have kept Blue’s corpse outside my house for a year, lacking the means and will to revive him after his glorious exit and lacking the will to let him go. Yesterday he was towed. He is gone now and all I have are memories and a few pictures to show my children when I tell stories of his exploits, which I will as I have promised him I would going up steep mountain passes. None of them will ever know him in the metal but they will know his noble spirit.