Posted on 01/03/2014 6:36:31 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Whatever the merits or demerits of Mark Steyn's recent play on the old Rat Pack "fruit cordial" joke (I still think it's a funny one), events down in Miami have underscored the wisdom of the old line that, "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." Yesterday, Pasco County Sheriff's Deputies responded to the home of Phillip Joseph Smolinsky, 36, at the behest of his live-in girlfriend who complained that Mr. Smolinsky had thrown a banana at her. Au Contraire, retorted Phillip, it was his girlfriend who flippantly flung the flying fruit at him!
But the evidence was too much. Police found the banana in the garbage and parts of the peel on the ground, while another of the officers noticed that the girlfriend's face was, "slightly red," which she said resulted from catching said banana with her face. Whereupon Mr. Smolinsky was charged with domestic battery, pepper-sprayed, and arrested rendering the whole affair decidedly unfruitful and something less than cordial.
Meanwhile, in Phoenix, Arizona, the parents of Aiya Altameemi are experiencing something more agreeable than pepper spray for having administered a most righteous and old-fashioned Sharia-style honor beating to their teenage daughter. Mohammed Altameemi, and his wife Yusra, learned that young Aiya had talked to a boy, dontcha know. So, to retrieve what passes for honor in that bunch, Mohammed cut the girl's neck, while her mother and sisters bound her hands and body with rope and taped her mouth, after which the family took turns burning her face and chest with a hot spoon. Oh yes, among the girl's effronteries to the family's honor was her resistance to being forced to marry a 38-year-old man. Kids these days...
To save it's own honor, did the Arizona criminal justice system sentence the parents to the hoosegow? Were they at least given a snoot full of pepper spray? Perhaps they were smacked in the kisser with a banana? Not quite. Rather, these parental miscreants were given two years of supervised probation.
I don't know what Mr. Smolinsky will get for flinging the fickle fruit of fate at his girlfriend, but if it's anything more severe than probation, he need merely change his name to Mohammed and then he can throw the whole banana tree around with impunity, because as everyone knows, we can only truly exemplify real diversity and tolerance by emasculating our own culture while playing coy with the barbarism of those who seek our destruction.
In his seminal book, How Democracies Perish, Jean Francois Revel observed that:
"Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high."
Western culture, it seems, has become particularly numb to existential perils both internal and external. Look to the Mideast, where Israeli Prime Minister had a polyp removed from his colon yesterday, before the arrival of Secretary of State Kerry today, thereby exchanging one pain the bum for another. Fresh on the heels of a lamentable agreement between the US and Iran that must have Israel feeling rather like Czechoslovakia after the Munich Conference, Prime Minister Netanyahu is learning first-hand what happens when the world's beacon of freedom dims its light and the looming darkness encroaches.
So what has happened? Our ancestors took on the world's mightiest power in a seemingly impossible conflict, risking their lives, fortunes, and honor to give a freedom a chance, -- to give us a chance. From those lofty heights, their descendants tamed a continent and defeated the scourge of slavery on American soil, and their descendants stood taller still, through several generations, to crush seemingly omnipotent totalitarian powers whose appetites could only be satiated by devouring every last vestige of human freedom on the planet! These are our predecessors! Their struggle for liberty is our struggle, their attainment of freedom is our heritage! Today we stand on the shoulders of giants, -- only to learn that our leaders are afraid of heights.
Talented intellectual and shrewd observer Camille Paglia recently lamented that, "What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide." Commenting that most of today's elite classes are found in finance or in politics, she said in an interview that:
"These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."
The weakening of America, Ms. Paglia continued, starts early:
"Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical engery, especially guys. …They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."
I wonder, though, if this softening, or feminization, or neutering, or whatever one might call it, is in reality an almost inevitable sort of mediocrity that creeps into the cultural ethos after a certain level of freedom and affluence have persisted over time? In his piece, Political Timidity and Clerical Cowardice, Professor Paul Rahe inveighs against the reticence of leaders in the political and spiritual realms to stand firmly against professional relativists who presume to instruct us not only on what sort of speech is permitted in a free society, but who twist Christian teachings into knots that a boy scout couldn't unravel, and yet are met with silence from those who know better.
"I remember when I was a child," said Winston Churchill, "being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as 'The Boneless Wonder.'" Churchill continued, "My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench." The object of Churchill's scorn, Ramsay MacDonald, may no longer be with us, but a "Boneless Wonder," is no longer a wonder at all. Today they multiply, and have titles that typically start with a misapplication of the words, "The Honorable," and they have been on the job a very, very long time.
So yes, I suspect it is mediocrity. Mediocrity and lethargy. From a President who cedes more power and influence to freedom's enemies abroad even as he schemes to deprive us of our freedoms and property at home, to a nominal political opposition party that continually mistakes favorable terms of surrender for an actual fight, our leaders have gone positively noodle-spined.
"In terms of politics and morality," said Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa, "America no longer leads the world. It's a dangerous situation so that we are awaiting a president who will understand that." To which one adds that many Americans are awaiting such a development as well.
Those of us on the right are used to being told that we are, "blinded by ideology," though the phrase is most usefully employed when applied to the collectivist and his enablers ostensibly on our side. For to be ideologically blinded is not to just be cheerfully oblivious to a few limited prescriptions, like the cumulative value of a marginal tax rate reduction, or the temporary suspension of a requirement to purchase a carbon indulgence from Al Gore. Rather, it is to live in perpetual night, unable to see good from bad, invincibly ignorant of the distinction between a Biblical injunction to personal charity and the armed confiscation of private property by the state.
The time for making accommodation with the statist must end, as it falls to us as citizens to infuse our leaders with the fortitude required to defeat the mastermind and his designs on our lives and those of our children. And if the politicians decide they would rather fight us than fight the statist? Our's is a country where courageous and wise people abound, and where no politician is indispensable.
Tell it brother.
You’ve made my day with this one, CW. Thanks!
This line sums our situation up well -
“...from a President who cedes more power and influence to freedom’s enemies abroad even as he schemes to deprive us of our freedoms and property at home, to a nominal political opposition party that continually mistakes favorable terms of surrender for an actual fight, our leaders have gone positively noodle-spined”.
In our long trail of human history it is becoming increasingly evident that prosperity breeds complacency. The statists are the only ones who are not. I once met a woman who received her PhD in Germany the very month Hitler came into power. I asked her how such a thing could happen to such an intelligent culture and she said, “You’d be surprised what people will do when they think everyone else is doing it. By the time we figured out what was going on, it was too late to do anything about it.”
"Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical engery, especially guys. …They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."
IOW we don't have long and it may already be too late.
The attitude of our elites is sort of like that of the Manicheans: no one is at fault for doing what they do. They are what they are.
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