We’ve covered quite a few topics on TRIFECTA over the past year — three a week adds up! — and it occurred to me that we don’t get a chance to talk too much about who we are and where we come from.
So I thought I spend a segment that just dealt with Your Humble Hosts… just a few personal questions to let you get to know us a little better. You can find that trisected warmth here.
Next up: BEYOND THE BURNER… some thoughts on Harrison Ford and my encounter with Indiana Jones in the skies over Southern California.
In 1977, during my senior year in High School, I went to a drive in theater and sat on the roof of a station wagon to see a movie called Star Wars.
Star Wars was set a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away – only it wasn’t. It was about a farm boy from Tatooine – who was really a farm boy from Iowa – who meets a Corellian pirate with a fast starship – who is really a high school jock with a hotrod – and together they set out to rescue a Princess from Alderaan – who, again, is really just some snooty girl from the big city.
And it was just great fun. That movie changed the world.
Then, four years later when I was at the University of Florida, I saw a movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark. It featured a daring, adventurous, brilliant American explorer named Indiana Jones who roamed the world stealing things in the name of science.
And it too was just great fun.
Now, if you’re looking for that spirit of adventure – that sense of freedom and euphoria with just enough of an element of danger to get the blood flowing, then you cannot do much better in the real world than flying a small airplane. It’s been my passion all of my life. So imagine my delight to discover that Harrison Ford — the actor who of course portrayed both Han Solo and Indiana Jones — he and I both share the same passion for the challenge and transcendental freedom that comes with being a pilot.
Now a few days ago, Mr. Ford was doing an interview and casually mentioned how deeply he loved the freedom of flight:
“Learning to fly was a work of art,” said Mr. Ford. “I’m so passionate about flying I often fly up the coast for a cheeseburger. Flying is like good music; it elevates the spirit and it’s an exhilarating freedom.”
Like good music, it elevates the spirit and it’s an exhilarating freedom. Exactly right.
But the days of elevated spirits and exhilarating freedoms are coming to an end here in America. Because Harrison Ford – the quintessential American actor playing the archtypical American rebel and adventurer, can no longer use his own money, his own time and his own freedom to hop in an airplane and fly up the coast for the proverbial hundred dollar hamburger. Not if Wendy Buckley has her way!
Dr. Buckley, proprietor of carbonfootprint.com, located in fine old Worting House on Church Lane in Basingstoke, Hampshire, United Kingdom, has publicly called Mr. Ford’s personally funded search for an elevated spirit and exhilarating freedom “unnecessary.”
She goes on to say that “Flying is a huge source of carbon emissions and making unnecessary journeys by plane can no longer be seen as responsible to our environment. Stars like Harrison Ford need to embrace the huge opportunity to lead by example in the battle against climate change – reduce their overall lifestyle carbon footprint and carbon offset those unavoidable emissions.”
Now Mr. Ford, you will be pleased and surprised to know that Dr. Wendy Buckley herself can help you in this regard because at her website you can in fact purchase absolution at the bargain rate of $25.61 per ton of carbon emitted. What a remarkably selfless and helpful woman.
Mr. Ford, I’d like to speak to you now not as a Hollywood celebrity and not even as a fellow pilot, but rather as the actor that was able to find within himself that exceedingly rare alchemy of rebellious charm mixed with fundamental decency and innocence. I’d like to speak to the person who has captured the American spirit in the characters of Han Solo and Indiana Jones in a way that has never been surpassed, and which brought you – deservedly – the resources to buy and fly your own airplanes and experience the exhilaration that you and I and very few others can actually comprehend.
I am asking that man to do the right thing, to stand up and publicly invite Dr. Wendy Buckley of Worting House in Basingstoke, UK to share a moment of our pilot’s euphoria by taking a very long flying leap off of a very short pier. Mr. Ford, stand up and tell Wendy Buckley to Pound Sand!
From Dr. Jones to Dr. Buckley: just say, “This is none of your business! It’s a free country!”
Remember that little expression? “It’s a free country!” Remember when that was a common response to these petty tyrannies? Remember when any time anybody tried to tell you what you could and could not do we didn’t just whimper and apologize we used to turn to them and say, “Who died and made you king? This is a free country! I’ll do what I damn well please!”
Does this matter? Yes it does. Because freedom of action and personal responsibility are welded together, two sides of the same coin. When we are free to do as we please we become the kind of independent, self-reliant people who will step up in emergencies. And when we surrender our will to other people who live to tell us what to do, we then become dependent on being told what to do all the time.
My brother Steve is a year younger than me. Right around age 13 Stevie used to take a tent, his dog and a shotgun and hitchhike from our home in South Florida out into the Everglades. He’d usually be gone or two or three days. Did my mom worry about him? Yes she did, but on some level I guess she preferred to raise an independent boy who was living his life to the fullest rather than perpetually trying to defend a life-long infant.
A few months ago I heard in passing that Steve had been on his way to work one morning when he passed a car that was on fire with the driver still inside. He pulled over, grabbed his crowbar, smashed the window and with the help of another passing citizen pulled her out and saved her life. He never thought to mention this to me. I found out about it second hand a few days afterward.
Or parents raised all of us in the way that most American kids used to be raised: to be free and independent and capable of acting on our own initiative when the moment called for it. We rode in the back of pickup trucks and station wagons, we played on monkey bars and carousels and big old swing sets that we used to endlessly try to go all the way over on. We got hurt, and banged up, and we learned our lessons, and our survival rate did not seem to be significantly lower than the kids today, who, if they go outside at all, play non-competitive games on rubberized surfaces with anxious parents hovering a few inches away ready to catch them before they hit the ground.
How are these kids going to turn out? Well, a couple of months ago, I had to have my car towed from my parking garage. The man with the tow truck, named Eddie, pushed from the front while I pushed and steered from the side and after we got it on the truck he thanked me for the effort, to which I replied, “what am I going to do – just sit there and watch? Well, as it turns out, most men in Los Angeles do just sit there and watch. If it’s raining, these grown men will sit in the car while Eddie pushes – for a hundred yards down a slippery street. His number one call is to go out and change a tire: change a tire for grown men who just don’t know how.
So what does this have to do with Harrison Ford and Wendy Buckley? Well, Americans like Han Solo and Indiana Jones are free men. They are brave, resourceful and kind. And they take the initiative – that’s what Americans used to know how to do in their bones. . They do not wait to be told what to do because they do not have to be told what to do. They know what to do.
Back in Dr. Buckley’s home, Great Britain, a little girl recently burned to death in her apartment as a result of what started as a smallish fire. A few brave men tried to enter the building to save her life, but they were forcibly prevented by the police – who not only did not go in to save her but in fact barred the way of the men who tried to.
When it was over, the police were congratulated by the police chief – a man no doubt after Wendy Buckley’s heart – who after all only wanted to prevent the additional loss of life that may have occurred should those men had attempted a rescue.
So the question is, ladies and gentlemen, which kind of world do you want to live in? A world where a little girl dies in a fire, along with perhaps two or three other heroic men who tried to save her? Or one in which that girl’s one chance at life, and a future, and children and grandchildren, was taken from her by policemen guarding her from individual action on behalf of the safety-minded nanny state… this horrific, faceless state identified only by the condescending smile of those acting out of the greater good… that cradle-to-grave, busy-body, do-gooderism that condemned that little girl to death and prevented by state force the free-will decision of those heroes who chose to risk their own lives to save another.
That kind of society is coming here. That ethos is growing daily here – in the last bastion of human freedom and initiative. Each year, fewer and fewer people – good-hearted people – will take the initiative to enter a burning house or car – or even change their own tires – because we allow people like Wendy Buckley to tell us what we can and cannot do with our own time, our own money and our own freedom.
If we surrender to these people, personal freedom and bravery – they are welded together – will wither and vanish, just as it did in the Soviet Union when this same sort of people finally got the power they live for. When Han Solo made the Kessel run in twelve parsecs, no doubt some bureaucrat was there to say that the Kessel Run should never be made in under 18 parsecs as it’s wasteful of fuel destructive to wormholes. Would Han Solo take that? Wasn’t the entire point of Star Wars the fight to make it a Free Galaxy? What the hell is the point of a Free Galaxy if you can’t do the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs when you feel like it? If you want to be a slave to the Imperial Bureaucracy, just come out and say so.
You’ll no doubt be pleased to know that the Heritage Foundation has, for the first time ever, has downgraded the United States of America from being a free country, economically, to being Mostly Free – in the same company as Chile, Bahrain, The Netherlands, Mauritius, Lithuania and Botswana.
(click to enlarge)
Oh, and culture lovers, just in case you can’t see the obvious: the reason the first three Star Wars movies were so terrific, and the second three sucked so bad, is actually very simple. The first three were about rebels, shooting guns and driving fast, and speaking with American accents. The second three were about politicians, discussing treaties and holding court, and speaking with British accents.
It’s coming. But we can stop it. If we have the will, we can stop it. We can still do it, if we chose to: here in the land of the mostly free, and the home of the occasionally brave.
Just when you think these cads, louts and blackguards cannot get any more sleazy, intimidating or appalling… you discover that they can. And do.
Is the Democratic strategy to chew and drag this awful health care fiasco over the line really to try to eliminate as many members of congress as possible in order to reduce the number of ‘yes’ votes needed? Rep. Massa says that is exactly what is happening.
Steve Green, Scott Ott and I try to respond. I say try, because this is passing the realm of what is possible to parody. Probable content warning for adolescent humor and appropriately inappropriate Tweets.
You can watch it in all its juvenile glory here.
Today’s Afterburner takes a look at the Nanny State’s attempt to control the actor who played the two most iconic, rebellious, adventurous characters in movie history. Harrison Ford has been chastised for flying “unnecessarily.” Would Han Solo Take that? Would Indiana Jones? Why should we have to take it?
The link is here. Full text tomorrow, and on Wednesday, I’m going to start a small segment called “behind the ‘burner,” developing a few of the ideas a little further.
Hope you like it.
[I am going to start publishing the text of the Afterburner's sometime after they appear on PJTV (I tried to do it before they appeared once, and the text got the link and not the video!)
Hope you like it. I am very, very proud of this one.]
Just a few blocks away from the Capitol building is an unassuming, dingy flophouse – once owned by one William Peterson – which is directly across the street from Ford’s Theater, and it was to this tiny aprtment that President Lincoln was carried on that awful night back in 1865. I had read about this small, shabby little place for decades, and seen many deathbed illustrations of the place, but nothing can prepare you for how small, how appallingly, claustrophobically tiny, and dingy and cheap this little room actually is. There on this very spot, the sixteenth president underwent what a Civil War surgeon – who had seen horrors the modern mind cannot comprehend – called the most pathetic and agonizing death he had ever seen. It took eight hours.
To stand in that little room, a foot or two away from where Abraham Lincoln breathed his last in the middle of such squalor, brought crashing home to me the humanity of history, the small, pathetic humanity of it: just another death in a sea of life and death, no different really than anyone else.
And yet, just a mile or two away from that dark and depressing deathbed, stands this:
…This temple, where the imperishable words of that man are written in granite and viewed by millions and millions of people each year. Those words and ideals are read, aloud or in silence, by new generations every single day.
That transformation from dying flesh into eternal marble, that fundamental understanding that there is more to man than brain and blood and bone, that a final, desperate gasp was not the end of Abraham Lincoln and the ideals he espoused but rather the beginning of them: these are the lessons you can take from the city of Washington, if you only have the ear to hear them.
Lincoln, for all his many political gifts, was above all a writer, a man who used language as music: music, imperishable music to the American people.
Here is a little of that music:
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.
I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…
And finally, in these bitter and contentious times, a heartfelt one for our liberal friends across the political aisle:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
These words are in granite, in a marble temple, visited by millions. These words will never die.
However….
In another temple, near the other end of the mall, sit the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution – the real documents, the real things, which I saw on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, with a line far, far shorter than at any McDonald’s at any food court in any other mall at that same time on that same Sunday.
Many of us talk a lot about the Constitution these days, but I don’t want to talk about the Constitution – I want to talk about the Declaration. The Constitution is the “how” of America, but the declaration is the “why.”
So much vitriol and anger is directed to the Tea Party movement: cries of racism and outright lunacy, the depiction of the people who attend these events as a bunch of wild-eyed paranoid radicals who are just waiting to shoot and hang people in some misguided, knuckle-dragging zeal whipped up by rabble-rousers like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, an uneducated, ill-read group of imbeciles who get ginned up over guns and Nascar.
The modern Tea Party movement is made up of people peacefully protesting tax rates that, taken in total, approach half of all of their income; protesting the takeover by unelected czars of entire sectors of the economy; protesting the drunken orgy of spending not only the present wealth of the nation but the wealth of our children and our children’s children; protesting waste on a scale where a billion dollars – one thousand million dollars – is essentially undectable, a rounding error… all of that, which its critics decry as mouth breathing paranoia… while the founders, enshrined in the mural surrounding these documents and which these same critics claim to revere – these founders, the greatest minds ever assembled in one place in the history of the world – took their country to war against the greatest military force on the planet because of a one-cent tax on tea.
Think about that! Forget the penny tax! It was never about the tax. It was about the idea of being ruled by people who cared not a whit about your lives but who only saw you as a source of revenue for their own grand ideas.
The why of America – when it’s all said and done – is simply this: we will be governed with our consent, but we will not be ruled.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And so, I came to read the Declaration – the why of America – to see the actual words on the actual parchment. But you cannot read the Declaration of Independence, even when it sits an inch beneath your fingers.
I had expected to see this:
Black letters on crisp yellow parchment. But this is not what you see. This is what you see:
My friends, the declaration of Independence is gone. The actual parchment is there, much softer and larger and whiter than I expected it to be, but the letters – the words – are gone. Gone.
Yes, the massive capital letters that read “In Congress, July 4th, 1776” are still somewhat legible. But the actual document is utterly unreadable. Even the bold, black signature of John Hancock, has now faded and decayed to this to a barely discernable black smudge.
The Declaration of Independence – the foundational “why” of why we are here – is faded, irreparably faded, and lost to us forever. And the sight of it filled me with despair. Not only for the lost document. I became overwhelmed with despair because the loss of the words on the parchment beneath the glass at my fingers felt a perfect analogy for the fading of those words and ideals from the pages of society. Like the ghost signatures on this pale surface, so many of these ideals are faded and worn — almost invisible, today.
And the instant I had that thought I had another. This document, this piece of parchment, is unreadable. So I resolved to make a copy: just for me.
I wrote it out, by hand, using a four-dollar fountain pen I got at the drug store and copied onto regular printer paper. I could have typed it – heck, I could have texted it – but wanted to write it out by hand. I wanted it to hurt a little.
And I would urge you now – I would urge each of you listening to this today, especially those of you with children – to help me recover this document. We can’t get that ink back on that paper. But we can do something better. We can put new ink to fresh paper, and copy down once again those words exactly as they were written. We can whisper them aloud as we write them – as I did – and through writing them anew on the page we will inevitably write them anew on our hearts, as fresh and as clear to our eyes and our souls as they were the day that ink dried in that hall in Philadelphia.
A piece of parchment is a piece of old skin. A flag is a piece of colored cloth. A man groans in agony, dying in a dirty room. None of that matters. Not here. Not in America.
For above and beyond faded ink, and strips of colored cloth, and whimpers of pain are ideals that come once in all of history. Once. Never again.
When Abraham Lincoln, now sitting on his throne in that temple of glory, wrote that We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth he was talking about the Declaration. He was talking about the idea that free people consent to be governed by their representatives, not ruled over by people who see them only as a source of revenue. And that one essential ideal is preserved not in marble, or even on parchment, but rather in the hearts of people willing to stand out in the rain and say they will not tolerate this any longer.
There is no marble monument to these ideals. This we will have to do ourselves. We will keep these ideals alive. We will copy them by hand. We will keep these imperishable ideals alive because they keep us alive. And as long as we do this, with our own hands, they – and we – will never die.
February 12th, 2010 7:05 pm
[I'm slowly trying to move the best of the old archives over here to the new. Mostly that consists of the SILENT AMERICA essays, but there were a number of pieces that I really liked, and this is one of them -- courtesy of a request by an old friend who was looking for it.
In a month or two I'm going to be putting out two compilations of previously unpublished materials: SEEING THE UNSEEN: ADVENTURES IN CRITICAL THINKING and AFTERBURNER! VOL. 1.
This will be in the former. It originally appeared in late July of 2006.]
There was a time – and being born in 1959, I am old enough to remember it – when the idea of Civilization needed no explanation or defense. Everybody knew what it meant. The very idea of Civilization was tied to another term, now likewise mocked, and that term is Progress.
Progress was the idea that society was moving forward, upward, toward higher goals – better medicine, faster transportation, the brutality of hard labor replaced by stronger, then smarter machines; abundant energy, increased wealth and leisure: all of these things were greatly desired, and society was proud to provide them, proud to show them off in World Fairs and Expos and in the mythology of the movies.
Now “progress,” and “civilization,” are ironic terms, in sneer quotes, muttered with that pathetic, bored tone of cynical nihilism started by the narcissistic brats that I have been ten years behind for my entire life. Today, I try to exercise and watch my weight only so that I may live long enough to see the last of these radical hippies die in their sleep.
The entire concept of Civilization has been deconstructed, and vilified, so that by having the audacity to defend the ideals of Civilized behavior you a branded a racist or a Nazi or even a conservative. Why all the hatred? Why are so many people so ashamed of the most amazing Civilization that has ever existed on the face of this planet? What the hell have these people been taught to make them think such transparent nonsense?
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I believe that human beings are interchangeable.
By this I mean that had Baby Billy been dropped off in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and raised by Yanomami tribesmen (and according to my mother there were times when I was in real danger of this happening), I would have spent my youth learning to hunt monkeys with my bow and 6ft. long arrows, and generally hanging around the shabono sleeping in till almost 6am. Likewise, if Baby Kopenawa had my parents, he’d probably be cranking out online essays at irregular intervals and shooting instrument approaches in experimental canard airplanes.
I don’t believe such a thing because I want to (although I do)…I believe it because to me it seems like coastline rather than map. I believe it based on the fact that wherever I look I see a full spectrum of multi-colored barbarians and savages, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, a rainbow of the brilliant and the civilized and the decent. Rwanda and Bosnia are on different sides of the planet, and their citizens as different-looking from each other as humans can be, but the horrors each perpetrated during the last decade should put to rest forever the idea that a few millimeters of melanin can save us or doom us one way or another.
There may in fact be some genetic component to intelligence, but if there is, I believe it pales compared to the effect of culture – and by that, mostly I mean the luck of the draw regarding your parents. In fact, I’ll bet my life on the fact that I can make astronauts and engineers out of any healthy babies of any color. I know I could make murders and rapists out of anyone, and that this is far easier to do than the former.
So when we talk about the entire idea of civilization, a simple glance at history shows we are not talking about race at all. At various times in history the leading civilization has been black, yellow, brown, or white, and the barbarians lined up to tear down those civilizations have been of every color as well. So to make claim that one culture is civilized while another is not is somehow racist is patently ridiculous on its face. Anyone who claims otherwise is trying to shut down the argument because they know they cannot win it on facts and logic – which to some of these people are also racist. But facts and logic don’t give a damn what they think…facts and logic exist whether they like it or not. So do I, and I don’t give a damn what such people say, either. This intimidation tactic has silenced benign, well-meaning people for too long. How would a real Nazi respond to being called a racist? Hitler, dude, you’re like a total racist! That’s a compliment to goose-stepping sons of bitches. That’s a badge of pride for them. Only decent people are deterred by such rhetoric…and that is the entire objective. It works. But not here. Not anymore.
It’s not the hardware, it’s the software. It’s not race, it’s culture.
That’s what I believe.
There is a full-court effort to tear down civilization these days, to make ridiculous even the very idea of civilization, and that is a fight worth rising to. Because the unseen rhizomes of civilization – the impenetrably vast and intricate connections that exist out of our view, beneath the surface of our blinkered daily existence – produce so much that is good and necessary and completely taken for granted that to lose it would be to lose what makes us fully human.
And I don’t want that to happen. Do you?
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Let’s start with the obvious save the sublime for a moment….
I like to fly. Lots of reasons, but here’s one of the best: there is a moment during an instrument departure when – just for an instant – your head breaks out of the clouds but your body still feels engulfed in the mist. For those amazing few seconds you have a real, stationary frame of reference, and the sensation of brightening whiteness, followed by that incredible rush of speed as you punch through the top of the cloud deck, and the cotton turns to a blur as it roars past your ears…well, that’s worth the work it takes to do such things.
On the last day before my Instrument checkride, I departed from Santa Monica airport with my flight instructor to my right and my gorgeous pilot girlfriend in the back seat. We were given a clearance to climb to 4,000 ft. out to an intersection called SADDE. I expected we’d pop right out of the thin marine layer in a few seconds, as we usually did. But nooooo. This was several thousand feet thick – and dense. I can tell you in all honesty we could not see the wing tips ten feet away. It’s like the windows were painted white. Flying on instruments is just like regular flying, only you can’t see anything.
So barreling through the air at about 180 mph, I began my right turn towards SADDE. A glance down at the Turn Coordinator, a nice standard rate turn to the right, airspeed’s good, the engine seems happy…and then I notice that the Attitude Indicator – also known as an Artificial Horizon and my main view of the world outside – is showing me in a turn to the left, and increasing – fast.
Turn Coordinator showing right turn…Artificial Horizon showing one to the left. And in that instant, I felt something grab me by the toes. It was the sharp, tearing claws of panic, working their way into my shoes. I’ve had two engine failures in my flying career, and both of them were immediately followed by this same sick feeling. That fear has to be stepped on right now. If you start thinking about the hundreds of JFK, Juniors I’ve read about and all the airplane wreckage scraped off mountainsides like the one I was approaching then you are already most of the way to being dead.
Craig, we got a problem here. That was what I said, if in a vocal pitch that only dogs and flight instructors could hear. The turn coordinator and the AI are telling me different things!
He turns and looks at me calmly. Bummer!, he says casually, showing why the vast majority of CFI’s are not killed in training accidents but rather choked to death, found with finger-shaped bruises to the left side of the neck.
Then he gave me the best piece of advice I have ever received.
Kick its ass, he said. And that was it.
But that was all I needed to hear. God damn right! I’ll kick its ass!
That’s a decision you make…a decision to not be ruled by fear and panic. It is a decision to take all of those hard-wired instincts that have brought us so far – the fear of falling, the rising desire to just call for help then curl up in a ball – and put them away. Forget what the seat of your pants is telling you: that’s an express elevator down to an NTSC report with your name on it. The Attitude Indicator shows a turn to the left. Turn coordinator shows a turn to the right. But! Both the heading indicator and the whiskey compass also show a turn to the right. The A.I. – my only intuitive look at the world outside – is lying to me. I force myself to realize it is outvoted. We’re not turning left, like the little airplane wings on the little horizon in the little picture. We’re turning right.
This is the essence of training: the ability to do the right thing, not the instinctive thing. It is the voluntary placement of the human above the animal, the cerebral cortex above our reptile brain, which can be very LOUD in times like these. It is, in the end, a call to trust: trust your instruments, trust your airplane, trust your training and ultimately to trust yourself. This willing shift, this prying the claws of emotion from the inner voice of reason… this is the very essence of civilization. Trust what thousands of people have literally given their lives to teach us, even if it goes against instinct, survival and fear. Trust… It’s what makes the whole thing work.
Meanwhile, I need to notify Air Traffic Control that we’ve got a problem.
Socal approach, Experimental One Echo Foxtrot has a failed attitude indicator.
One Echo Foxtrot, roger. Do you wish to continue the approach?
No sir. What I’d really like is for someone to get a really big f***ing ladder and get us out of this mess.
Affirmative, One Echo Foxtrot will continue inbound on the ILS to Burbank.
One Echo Foxtrot, roger.
It’s much, much later that I wonder how and why the human animal – which when you get right down to it should really only need enough brainpower to make a sharp stick to throw at a gazelle – has enough reserve neuron connections to build a civilization so complex that a hairless ape like myself can chase a set of white needles across a four-inch instrument, while hurtling blind a mile up in the air at 150 knots without leaving nail and bite marks on the plexiglass. But, somehow, that’s what I did.
A few minutes later, I could see a patch of ground directly below, and then, after a little more needlework, we popped out beneath the layer. There, dead ahead, were the flashing approach strobes…Burbank Airport, right where those damn little white needles said it would be. Truth to tell, I was actually slightly to the left of the runway centerline, and Craig, my mute flight instructor in the seat next to me, was slightly to the right of it. That is a hell of a feeling, coming home to civilization, to an airport beacon right where it was supposed to be, to leave death up in the grey soup just this once with a weird, indescribable, clearly paradoxical mixture of burning pride and deep humility.
How many people were there with me that day? Not just the obvious two – Dana and Craig, who’s support kept my monkey brain in the back of my head to return to throw pooh another day. How many guys were watching me on radar, keeping me separated from far, far better men and women who do this in their sleep up there? How many people did it take to make the instruments, to mine the silica for the glass, to tap the rubber for the wires? Who laid the asphalt on the runways, who built the filaments in the approach strobes, and who attached the ceramic tips to my spark plugs? And how many millions of other unseen connections had to be made to allow me to do, routinely, and on a middle-class salary, what billions of dead men and women would have given a lifetime to taste – just once. In those few minutes I just told you of, I stood on the shoulders of millions of my brothers and sisters, not the least of which were two sons of a preacher from Dayton, Ohio – now long dead but with me in sprit every day. I was atop a pyramid of dedication, hard work, ingenuity and progress, following rules written in the blood of the stupid and the brave and the unlucky.
I had tossed myself a mile into the air and landed safe in this Web of Trust.
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Civilization is a loaded word, defined more often than not by its opposite: Civilization vs. Brutality. Civilization vs. Lawlessness. We’ll deal with both of those later. But for now, can we take a few moments to peel away the tiniest corner of the vast unseen web, to consider the depths of the Civilization we have built – Civilization vs. The Primitive?
Take a primitive society as an example – the Yanomami, say. Their primitiveness does not convey any moral disadvantage – there are millions of brutal people hidden in the folds of every civilization – nor does it provide them any moral pedestal either, for primitive people spend far more time at war, and suffer far greater violence per capita, than civilized people do. But one can call such a society primitive not only because the tangibles of civilization are absent – the cities and power grids and transportation lines — but because of the lack of complexity of their Web of Trust.
In a tribe of thirty individuals, with infrequent contacts with what are essentially the same neighboring tribes, a member of the Yanomami may perhaps extend his trust to a few dozen people. Perhaps there is a witch doctor who attends to the spiritual needs of the entire village, or some herbal specialists in certain families who can be relied upon more than others to relieve pain and mitigate the symptoms of illness. The hunting may be done by a smaller group, gathering by another…but when all is said and done the number of people you connect to is remarkably small. It is this close-knit aspect that appeals to many Western romantics, who admire the sincerity and human closeness provided by such cultures…that is to say, they admire it from a distance, in the pages of National Geographic say, or on the Discovery Channel. Needless to say, there is not a person in the West who subscribes to either outlet that cannot more or less immediately pull up roots and go and live the rest of their lives with these noble, authentic, warm, Third World people. And yet they do not. And it’s not hard to see why, for they too are in love with the standard of living that their civilization provides – a civilization some of them, certainly, profess to despise.
Every time two people come together and trade, wealth is created. Out of thin air. By magic. Every trade, every bit or work done by every human on the planet increases the complexity and order of the whole, and thus makes it more valuable. This is a rich subject, one we will return to in a following chapter. But for now, suffice it to say that if I, as a member of a hunter tribe, make great spears and crappy baskets, and you, as a gatherer, make beautiful baskets and miserable spears, then when we exchange my spear for your basket both of us walk away richer.
Every trade, every transaction, increases the total wealth – for both parties. In a primitive society, where there are at most a few score connections among the people in that society, there is very little wealth, and very little leisure. The simplicity of those connections is plainly obvious. But how much more complex is Western Civilization?
If you could hear each of these transactions – trade and trust relationships – would that help? Tribal life as the sound of stones thrown into a pond at irregular intervals; a small village the clicks of Geiger counter; a city the buzz of a hive of angry bees… and the whole of our incredible, magnificent Western Civilization the clear, pure tone of a tuning fork.
This complexity is absolutely taken for granted. No one sees it. Ah, but Grasshopper…that is because you choose not to look.
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Let’s look at Western Civilization at its naked pinnacle, at the height of its sheer fabulousness: Oscar night! It’s almost time for the Best Supporting Actor award!
Let’s start with the obvious: The amazing set, the stunning lighting, the beautiful people – not just American stars, but world-wide phee-noms. This culture reaches around the world. It’s a fair bet that every other crazed Jihadi getting lathered up for a good round of beheadings in Iraq or Afghanistan or Malaysia is wearing a Spider-man T-shirt of a Miami Dolphins cap or a pair of shorts with a Nike slash or one of the millions of other little trinketss mass-produced as easily as skin cells falling of the body of a sleeping Goliath.
But let’s peel away layers, shall we? One by one?
What about the television network that allows us to watch such things in the comfort of our homes? How much work did that entail? I work in television; I know how television and computers work – in theory. I could no sooner build a television or a computer from scratch than I could walk to Hawaii. I would be utterly incapable of manufacturing the most simple, basic component of a computer – one of the keys, say, or the on-off switch. Completely, and totally beyond my ability.
How many people did it take to make just one plasma TV screen? Just one? Not just the people that assembled it – how many people that made the components of that plasma set? How many people does it take to make just the little green power LED? That’s not done in a hut somewhere. And let’s not even begin to imagine the work needed to build the transmitters and fiber-optic lines, the satellites and launch systems, the local cable service, and their lines, and the repair technicians, and all of that.
I routinely have to enter a major communications ground center to arrange satellite uplinks to New York from L.A. Imagine a wall two stories tall and fifty feet wide, each with a perfect, brand-new color monitor – several hundred in all – on which is every show being broadcast over only a single satellite system. Hundreds of programs, in scores of languages, going up and down from satellites 22 thousand miles high – the entire world talking all at once, and those giant gold statuettes only one little window among hundreds, and thousands more unseen.
And the world yawns.
Peel another layer: somewhere, a man is walking across a poured concrete floor, inspecting huge generators that power an electrical grid that simply boggles the mind. None of this lighting or TV happens without it. In much of the world, electricity is still non-existent, or rationed to a few hours a day. Not here. And this generating plant relies on water being pumped through likewise unnoticed underground arteries, being watched over 24 hours a day by anonymous men and women up along the 5 Freeway, not watching the show because if they did there would be no show.
And another layer: Outside, a man stands on the street talking into a radio. His job is to coordinate the few hundred limousines lined up like rail cars at a switching station. No show without them, or their drivers. Or the people who run the gas stations that keep them running. Or the mechanics that repair the engines. Or the people that deliver the ice to the 7-11 to fill the champagne holders. Or the people that delivered that champagne in trucks, moving through the city at 3 am. Or the people that made the tires for those trucks. Or the Portuguese Engineers Mate, 3rd class, who is attending to a potentially dangerous hydraulic leak on the container ship that brings the tires into Long Beach.
And another layer: That man, on the radio? He presses a switch, and inside that radio a connection closes. That connection is made with a very small amount of gold. That gold was mined by another man in South Africa. That minor was fed by a cook from Thailand. That cook’s mother was saved by medication developed by a pharmaceutical lab in Philadelphia. One of the biochemists who developed that medication is alive only because of a pacemaker made in North Miami. The man who empties the trash in that medical office is a big fan of Andy Garcia, and one of his favorite movies is The Mean Season. And one of the reporters in the Miami Herald Newsroom in The Mean Season was…me.
And it never stops…ever. It just goes round and round. Any permanent break in the Web of Trust and the Oscars… go away.
But back to the show: Oh, look! George Clooney has won! Let’s see what he has to say? Uh-huh. He’s talking about how brave Hollywood is. For going out on a limb and speaking up against the repression machine. Yes, there he is, like all courageous dissidents: worth millions of dollars, his every utterance fawned over by armies of reporters and millions of admirers, telling us about the incredible courage it takes to speak up in Bushitler’s Police State.
He’s just come off of two, brave, brave adventures, you see: one where the heroes are pampered, high-powered television executives, who, in a time where they rigidly controlled all of the information going out to the vast majority of voting citizens, bravely stood up and refused to acknowledge that many of them were members of an foreign-controlled organization devoted to the destruction of their nation, and championed their unwillingness to take the same oath of loyalty required by the most destitute new citizen or the most simple farm-boy soldier. My God! What heroes!
But the award is for his moving and nuanced role as a representative of the American government, and it’s complicity in the illegal assassination of a kind and deeply moral Arab leader who only wants his wealth to be shared by his people, before being killed by rapacious, soulless American businessmen who only live for chaos and war because it helps line their pockets.
And the next day, this brave, brave man will wonder with a straight face why “liberal” has become a dirty word in America.
Of course, this is to real bravery what a painted flat is to a solid steel bank vault. Sure, McCarthy was a blowhard and a bully, and while there is such a thing as “treason,” “un-American” behavior would be beyond my ability to define. But the fact is, he was right. There were hundreds of people determined to undermine this system and replace it with one that has shot 100 million people in the back of the head at midnight in underground torture cells.
Fifty years ago.
Now, as it turns out, only a few years ago, a film director was stabbed to death on a street in broad daylight. He was not threatened with being fired by his own company. He was not being asked to sign a loyalty oath. No, Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death, and a note left on the knife blade embedded in his chest, because a filmmaker dared to speak his mind about something that actually involved real risk to himself. That sounds like genuine bravery to me. Will our intrepid free-speech champion be covering that one next, I wonder? I suspect not. Those murderers are, unlike Joe McCarthy, still alive. There is a particle of real danger attached to making such a movie. Perhaps this brave, courageous, Clooney voice will turn next to playing Boss Tweed, or perhaps the Teapot Dome scandal with bring him Oscar gold in the years to come. And in the end, who are we to judge a man’s courage, when he has already proclaimed it so loudly for himself.
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There are a few people who were not watching the Oscars that night, who I would like to take a brief moment to call your attention to.
Paul Smith wasn’t watching George accept his award for bravery. Paul wasn’t watching that night, because three years earlier Paul got on top of an Armored Personnel Carrier outside of Baghdad International, and provided the covering fire that saved his Brigade Combat team. Paul was killed during this action. How many people know about his bravery?
William Walsh missed the show too. He and some of his buddies were huddled in a stinking hole on Iwo Jima, and when a Japanese grenade came in to join them, Bill threw himself on it without hesitation. Here’s the really sad thing: Bill’s sons and daughters didn’t see the show, nor did any of his grandchildren, because he didn’t get to have any children or grandchildren. He was 23 years old. We share the same birthday, I found. But I had to look for him.
Andrew Jackson Smith was a Negro soldier in the Civil War. He apparently did not suffer any doubts about the worth of the nation that had held his people in slavery. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for risking his life to defend…a flag. Because of Corporal Smith, the regimental colors did not fall. That doesn’t mean much to people these days, but Smith was ready to die for it. He believed in this country. It took until July of 2001 for him to receive the recognition he deserved – a shameful lapse. But the wheels of justice, while turning slowly here, did, in fact, turn.
We can go on and on and on – all through 3,461 current Medal of Honor recipients. Not one of them could be named by any schoolkid in a hundred. Add all the other awards for gallantry and you have a small army of heroes, all unremembered by the huge majority of the population. And ask any combat vet, and he’ll tell you that only a sliver of the daily acts of sacrifice and heroism go reported, let alone recognized. For every Medal of Honor winner there are tens, perhaps hundreds, who have shown the same courage unsung. These people gave their lives for us…for this country and this Civilization. They gave their lives so we could live in the freedom, security and prosperity that alone allows us to be so callow, so cynical, and so relentlessly ungrateful to those who have sacrificed on our behalf.
We don’t see these things because we choose not to see them. But we not only have movie awards, we have movie awards season. Oscars, Golden Globes, SAG awards, People’s Choice…it goes on and on and on. A civilization that is this debased when it comes to who and what they glorify is in some trouble.
And it is deeper than even that. It is not just the unseen heroes. It is the unseen, anonymous people that make this whole thing work. Right at this exact instant, there are men and women making sure that you have clean, safe water. That your aspirin is safe, and works as advertised. That you can pick up a can of food in any store in the country and eat whatever is inside it without a second’s worry about its danger. Armies of people, millions of people, get up and go to work every day to make sure that all of the transparent, unnoticed and unsung strands in this Web of Trust function.
And even when you are all alone, in the wild, as far from the Web of Civilization as you can possible be, it is still there with you: in a body free from the parasites and diseases that have killed legions unimaginable, in a body free from pain, from the deformity of unset broken bones, in titanium hips and pacemakers we give not a second thought to. It is there in the mental bridge, the bridge only the designer sees as he looks across a chasm, before the first rivet is driven. Civilization is in our hearts when we stand around a water cooler with people from all across the globe: ancient enemies, perhaps…people our ancestors have fought with for centuries and millennia, and who we now replay Saturday Night Live routines for before heading back to our cubicles to refine a little more order out of the chaos.
So mark these words, for this is not something beyond our control:
Civilizations fall because people bitch and complain when the electricity is off for fifteen minutes, and never give a thought to the fact that it has been on for their entire lives.
February 8th, 2010 5:52 pm
Well, the Tea party movement is not even a year old, and already it is holding its first national convention. I was honored to be asked to speak at the West Los Angeles event on September 12th of last year, so unlike most of the talking heads you see opining on the Tea Party movement, at least I am one of the very few to have been to one personally.
Now the most remarkable thing about that remarkable experience is something that is very hard to put into words. It’s the quality that makes me reluctant to try and tell you what it is, because it clearly is so many different things to so many people. And that grass-roots, “never-done-this-before” sense of excitement and empowerment is the first thing that really hits you.
These are the most regular, decent people you’ll meet, and with very few exceptions not one of them has been involved in politics in any way. It’s just that — like so many of us — They’ve just had enough!
Of course, the media coverage has tried very hard to portray the normal, average, every-day Americans of the Tea party rallies as dangerous and angry racists and Wal-Mart knuckle-draggers, while identifying the mass-produced signs, the mass-produced T-shirts, the mass-produced members of bused-in wiccan nihilist anarcho-Maoist lesbian eco-weenie anti-war protestors as somehow the genuine voice of the American people.
So as a person who has been there, let me try and explain what I think this whole movement is about.
The people I have met at these events were generally the happy, decent, hard-working people that make up the vast middle of Silent America. They are not bitter, and they are not “consumed with rage.”
But they — I mean, we — are angry. We have a right to be angry. As a matter of fact, we not only have a right but in fact have an obligation to be angry. The spending orgy in Washington brought on by the Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the election of the most liberal member of the Senate to the office of the Presidency is taking the country off the edge of a cliff and everybody knows it.
This spending is so monumental, so out of control and so beyond the pale that huge numbers of what were honest, decent, hard-working and unassuming citizens no longer feel like taxpayers but rather like host organisms: we find ourselves staggering around in shock, like victims of a plane crash or some natural disaster, looking around at the destruction of the work ethic that gave five percent of the population an economy four times the size of its nearest competitor. We watch, horrified, at the government takeover not of businesses or industries but entire sectors of the free market. That’s why there’s a Tea Party.
You know what this reckless, Imperial orgy of spending feels like? It feels like coming out of the shower in the morning, dazed and exhausted after a good night’s sleep, and stepping in front of a mirror to find yourself covered in leeches that are sapping not just the blood it takes to make government function, but rather all of it — every last living drop of it — to fund entitlements and work projects and boondoggles of every description: congressional “climate change” junkets that include skiing and snorkeling days in New Zealand, and Bridges to Nowhere, and the use of Air Force jets as the personal chauffeurs not only of the Speaker of the House but for her families and business cronies, too. We see a President who talks about sharing hardship but who then decides to go out on date night and catch a show in New York City and ends up spending every single tax dollar you and your kids will make in your entire life: gone!
Gone! What did you get for it? Nothing. What service did it do the country? None! So why did they spend it? Because — listen now — they spent it because that’s not your money. That’s their money. Just because you got up in the morning, sat in traffic, and worked all day before sitting in traffic again to come home exhausted… that doesn’t mean it’s your money to these bloodsucking, leather-winged, Big Government entitlement-mongers. No, that’s their money to spend as they see fit — and not just all the money you send in taxes today, or next year, or the next ten years — they — Democrats and Republicans too — have spent all the money you will make in your lifetime, and then spent all of the money your kids will make, and the pool of work that your grandkids will do in 2060 or so — that’s mostly been spent too.
You want to know why we’re angry? What once was a social compact between the people and their representatives has rotted away into this: a people no longer paying a reasonable price for the limited number of things that only a government can provide, but rather victims of identity theft — people who open a monthly credit card statement only to discover fifty thousand dollars of vacations not taken, and jet skis and plasma TV’s paid for but never delivered. That’s why there’s a Tea Party.
Now some critics of the Tea Party movement say it is hypocritical to complain about Democrat spending without complaining about Republican spending as well. Well, there are two things to say about that: first, that is a profound insight from someone who has obviously never been to a Tea Party event, because if they had been there, they would know that the real thunderbolts thrown in response to this spending orgy is aimed not at the Democrats but rather the Republicans; the people who should know better, the people, in fact, that we thought would be standing guard over our hard-earned treasure, not shoveling it out the door by the fork-full.
Secondly, I’ll just let this graph do the talking.
The grey bars are Bush’s Deficits. Notice that they were declining yearly in his second term, until TARP — which President Obama claimed as his own personal miracle — drove them up during his last year. Now look at the red bars: that’s Obama’s spending: four times Bush’s last year — the spike of TARP included — and not for an emergency fix of the banks, but rather to buy things like ATV trails on one hand and General Motors on the other, all in the name of “stimulus,” which, we were promised, would cap unemployment at 8% instead of the nine or 10% we would see without the line at the government cash trough. The official unemployment rate is now at least ten percent; some analysts say the true number may now be half again that, or even double.
Oh, and by the way, shocking and damning though this graph is, it’s a little long in the tooth. The fact is, this President and Congress have been waging a year-long war against business and the evil, evil wealthy, who, needless to say, have decided to keep their heads down, produce less, and pay less in taxes.
Here’s a graphic that better illustrates the real effect of the decreased revenues as a result of this war on the private sector:
That’s why there’s a tea Party.
So what’s ahead? Well, no one knows, least of all me. But I do have a very strong sense of what should be ahead.
Despite the authentic and wholly justified sense of betrayal that many conservatives feel at the hands of the GOP, I think that talks of a third party are suicide: not only permanent minority status, but also handing the store over to the people most intent on robbing it — forever.
The Tea Party Movement is really the conservative movement. It’s like a soul that has somehow been cut off from its physical body, and now both wander the landscape, trying to decide what to do. Because if the Tea Party movement is the grass-roots, common-man philosophical soul of small government and personal liberty and responsibility, then the Republican party is the skeletal structure — the bones and arteries and sinews needed to live in the real world.
The only road to success and recovery from this rocket-sled of ruin is to re-unite these two elements. We tried that, actually: Tea Party passion and internet fundraising, plus GOP ground operations, call centers, networks and so forth, and this was the result:
Pretty damn impressive!
Now, was Scott Brown the perfect conservative candidate? To many — even many who supported him — he was not. That’s not the question we should be asking. The question we should be asking — and did ask, it seems — is not whether Scott Brown is more conservative than Ronald Reagan. The question is whether or not Scott Brown is more conservative than Ted Kennedy or Martha Coakley.
He is, and by a very wide margin. That’s a win!
Victory is a ratchet. To retake this country we need every gain we can get — no matter how small — and to give up as little as possible. If Scott Brown — Republican senator from Massachusetts — turns out to be the most liberal man in the Senate then we’re living in paradise. That’s why there’s a Tea Party. And that’s why being a part of the Tea Party movement is, when it is all said and done, just plain fun.
And a final note: do you know who we owe the remarkable success of the Tea Party movement to? We owe it to Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olberman, and Chris Matthews. We owe it to Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama — not just for the political motivation, but because they decided to make it personal.
By calling us Tea Baggers, and racists, and Nazis, and rubes, and hicks… by pretending we’re just a fringe group of dangerous radicals, or saying — as the President did, twice, and apparently with a straight face — that he was unaware that tens or hundreds of thousands of hard-working American patriots were clogging the streets of the city he lives in — well all of these geniuses poured can after can of lighter fluid on to what might have been some old, wet charcoal — nearly impossible to light — and turned it into a wildfire that will likely remake the landscape of this country. That’s why there’s a Tea Party.
So thanks, you big-brain, sneering, socialist ninnies! We couldn’t have done it without you.
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February 4th, 2010 2:45 pm
[I've been working like crazy on several projects outside of E3 and PJTV, and had so many plates spinning on sticks that I've felt like that giant plaster statue of the mammoth trying to crawl out of the La Brea tar pits. Needless to say, most of my energies have been spent on Afterburners. I have to write a serious essay a week, shoot, edit and air it... and to that extent I've utterly neglected Eject! Eject! Eject! Even the personal interaction I used to have in the comments has moved to my Facebook page, so things have been pretty lonely here while I was trying to figure out a long-term plan.
Well, from now on, a few things are going to change that should improve the level of service around here. First, I'm going to post the Afterburner essays here at E3, in text form, as soon as or perhaps even before they hit the air on PJTV. I've been so busy making them as TV segments that I have neglected to post them as written essays, and they hold up very well in that regard, I must say. So there will current Afterburners, some of the backlog of unpublished old Afterburners, and a continuation of re-posting the Silent America essays, which did not survive the move from the old site very well.
I hope to embed the YouTube version of the Afterburners as soon as they become available, too. Also, I plan to provide a few paragraphs several times a week on a story that catches my attention. These, I believe, are called "blog posts" and apparently can be less than 17 pages long! I will give this radical new idea a try as well.
Look for more action here -- a lot more -- starting now. And to get continuous updates on everything I write or shoot, you can't beat my Facebook page (link above) or follow me on Twitter @Bill Whittle]
If you asked the average American on the street what kind of government we have, they’d likely as not say we live in a democracy. A democracy is – by definition – where the people rule.
But we don’t live in a democracy. You don’t get to determine when or if our country goes to war. You don’t get to decide whether we drill for oil in Alaska. You don’t even get to decide how much of your own money is taken away from you – by force, if need be.
Unless, of course, you are one of 535 special Americans. Those people live in a democracy. The rest of us live in a Republic. This is an important thing to fully grasp – not just academically, but deep in your marrow. You need to understand this in your very bones.
308 million American lives are determined by 435 members of the House of Representatives. Now the real number varies by district, of course, but on average, that means that every member of the House speaks for about 708 hundred thousand Americans. Imagine seven Super Bowls filled to the brim, arranged in a circle, all emptying out into one massive parking lot. Imagine every singe man, woman and child from seven Super Bowls spilling out into one giant field… and there, on a small soap box, sits one man or woman who determines whether or not they go to war, how much they will be taxed, whether or not they will be able to see the doctor of their choosing, and thousands of other little tendrils of control over their very lives. That’s the House.
For the Senate, imagine every single person in your entire state! – in California that’s about fifty Superbowl stadiums – and all of them beholden to two – two! — men or women.
That’s a Republic. And despite the mind-numbing terror of it, it’s actually not a bad way to go. But why would so many free citizens be willing to put their lives and their fortunes into the hands of so few people?
Well, we would do it if we believed that the person in question was one of us. We do it because we believe that the person we send to Washington represents not every little detail but at least the core of our values and desires, our needs and our hopes. We do it because the person – in theory, now – has led a life at least somewhat like our own: known some hardship, and some success; tried to start a business or at least worked in one, as the huge vast majority of us do. They need to know who we are so that they can speak for us.
That is the one crucial element that makes a republic work. I may be Constitutionally entitled to have a defense attorney if I am accused of a crime, but if that person sleeps through my trial his physical presence is irrelevant since I am not being represented. And that disconnect between having a representative and actually being represented is what drove the election of Scott Brown.
At its core, the people of America’s bluest state found in the red candidate with the truck was in every way more like most of them than the Democrat with the pedigree and the endorsement of the state royalty.
On the eve of First Bull Run, in the heady days before the first big battle when everyone – North and South – though the Civil War was to be a ninety-day affair, President Lincoln looked out from his window in the White House at the fresh-faced men marching off to Manassas Junction.
“There are many single regiments,” wrote Lincoln “whose members, one or another, possess full practical knowledge of all the arts, sciences, professions and whatever else, whether useful or elegant, is known to the world, and there is scarcely one from which there could not be selected a President, a Cabinet, a Congress and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself. Nor do I say this is not true also in the Army of our late friends, now adversaries in this contest.”
This sentiment of Lincoln’s reflects more than just a love of the American people, professed, whether true or not, by all politicians. Lincoln did not only love the American people. Lincoln – as did Reagan and a few others – respected and admired the common American citizen. Reagan, and Lincoln, held themselves to be servants of these free and industrious people, and did not fancy themselves their nannies or their nursemaids and certainly not their betters. Contrast that attitude with the Imperial sense of noble obligation we see in this Congress and this President, at their smug, condescending and self-appointed role as the saviors of we poor, uneducated little people, who without their guidance can not dress or feed or employ ourselves.
So which view – elitist or populist — is correct? Well, what does history show? The attitude of Jefferson, and Lincoln, and Reagan, is that the collective genius of hundreds of millions of free people over two and a half centuries – we call this vast subterranean cavern of wisdom and experience “common sense” – is baked into our society and its traditions. That belief in the practicality, energy and ingenuity of the common man took a small group of rugged, proud and hard-working individuals and turned them into the most powerful, innovative, influential and decent nation in the history of the world, while all around us, for two and a half centuries, other nations have allowed pedigreed elites of one stripe or another to compete against us and be utterly left in the dust – every one of them.
All of the government intrusions into the free market that brought us the housing collapse were the result of isolated and imperial elitists who had no experience whatsoever in the real world of business, but were rather academics and lawyers who had a transparently untenable theory and the political power to enforce it. All of the exotic financial instruments to arise from this government intrusion – things like collateralized debt obligations – were the result of elitist Harvard MBA’s and not the failures of small, regional, common-sense banks that had the collective wisdom not to make loans to people who could not pay them back.
The most destructive and – by the way – power mad president of the last century, Woodrow Wilson, was an academic – in fact, he was the President of Princeton University. And the man who appears to be planted firmly in his footsteps with his plan to replace rule by the people with rule by Czars and Professors and Lawyers and other elitists, Barack Obama, is also an academic, having been a Professor at Columbia. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan – who after fifty years of appeasement at the behest of the best and the brightest decided to and then did defeat the greatest threat to freedom the world has ever seen – well, he went to virtually unknown Eureka college. Barack Obama’s self-professed idol, Abraham Lincoln, had about 18 months of formal schooling in his entire life. The greatest communicator of American values did not finish high school.
Or look at the Founders; men we revere for having set this nation on its course to unprecedented prosperity and freedom: Sam Adams was a brewer. Paul Revere was a silversmith, a man who made things with his hands. Franklin was a printer, his fingers black with ink. Washington and Jefferson were planters… farmers, basically. Thomas Paine, whose brilliant prose turned the tide of public opinion in favor of the American Revolution, had no schooling whatsoever. He became an apprentice corset maker at age 13.
There is a plank in the eye of the elitist. I know, I used to be one of them. Looking back on those days, I marvel at how certain I was about things I knew nothing about. I wince – I cringe – when I recall how dismissive I was of common people, the people you see at Wal-mart, say. Like so many of the elitists I see today, I wore a sense of intellectual superiority to make up for a profound sense of loneliness, failure, insecurity and lack of life experience.
It’s okay. I got over it. I got over it by listening to the wisdom and the goodness and the strength of self-identified “common people,” and discovered that not oneof them did not have some uncommon trait or understanding. I realize now, as I did not then, that every single person I meet knows more about hundreds if not thousands of things than I do. So I changed. I became a Daywalker. Now my mission is to go out and turn other elitist vampires and send them back toward the light.
Which brings us back to Scott Brown. He joked about his daughters being single. He joked about his truck. He said our money is better spent killing terrorists than defending them in court to cheers and thunderous applause and chants of U-S-A! U-S-A! … and this happened not in Texas but in Massachusetts! He is in touch with the common sense certainty that we are at war and not with the Ivory towered position of the President who thinks that we are not.
And parenthetically, how it galls these elitist so-called progressives that these two people who they so despise are so sexy and attractive and confident and at home in their own skins, as I have come to be once I realized that there is nothing particularly special about me other than my membership in the most awesome extended family this species has produced. Just an American citizen.
So, Scott – can I call you Scott? Doesn’t seem like you’re kind of guy who insists on being called Senator after all the hard work you put in getting there… Scott, I hear your truck has 200,000 miles on it. You’ve worked hard. If you want to buy a new truck to celebrate your win, I say go for it.
But when the day comes – and if you stay in Washington long enough then the day will come – when you decide that rather than driving yourself somewhere in your truck a man of your position deserves a chauffeured limo ride or an excursion in a private jet – then Scott, you won’t be Scott anymore. You’ll be Senator Brown. And when that day comes, Senator, you won’t be one of us anymore. You’ll be one of them. When that day comes, Senator, we’ll thank you for your service, because then it will be time to come home.
December 1st, 2009 11:46 am
Hat tip to Michael Moore for reminding me about President Eisenhower’s famous “Beware the Military-Industrial Complex” speech, in which the Liberal Icon and Pacifist Saint Dwight David Eisenhower had this to say:
“…the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
(Emphasis mine – BW)
I wonder if this admonition from Eisenhower – uttered a few moments after he warned of the influence of the Military-Industrial complex — will be repeated among the Left with the same grave sense of somber warning as his previous few sentences?
UPDATE: Since it’s my blog…
I read a comment on the original post that I thought deserved a brief response. Long time readers know I am incapable of a brief anything. I actually thought it raised enough interesting points to not have it buried in the comments.
So here’s the original comment, and my response below:
From PHILLIP:
It seems, for all your criticism of liberals, you’ve only shown your anti-science and intellectual biases.
“a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity”
This is talking about the risks inherent in pure science vs. Applied science, not so much just federal money. Pure science is studying something for it’s own sake (ie, Newton’s studying gravity as a curiosity). Federal funds, particularly in military research, sometimes grasp at the basic pure science questions, but always have the bent towards a practical application. This is what restricts curiosity. It could be said of privately funded R&D, particularly when business fund university research. The novel “Arrowsmith” by Sinclair Lewis captures this quite well in it’s character Max Gottlieb.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money”
This is goes back to the issue of funding. Grants are necessary to fund research. Industrial and military grants limit research potential because there is almost always an expectation of certain results, be they practical technologies or monetary gain.
The federal government could give money to answer the basic questions without immediate practical gain, but often as not Congress representatives will protest this, but have no problem backing pork projects in military or highway funding.
“danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.””
Let’s first recall Eisenhower says science should be respected, which the right has often not respected.
Unlike people in business or politics, there is a lot more self reflection by academics of their role in society. Putting aside the social scientists who often try to force there way in, academic scientist usually have the least interest in influencing the whole of society. Note the novelty when Rep. Bill Foster, a particle physicist, replaced Dennis Hastert in Congress.
They’ll often be content in doing their research and presenting the evidence as is. They’ll try to apply their findings to solve societies problems, but often the offices they seek are still within academia and out of the public spotlight or directly involved in public policy.
The scientifc-technological elite is important. This means defense contractors. They have a direct interest in government funding of their projects, but the cost is several times higher than would be pure research, and often benefits from there being more conflict, war, and instability.
Note the F-22 that Obama cut out of the budget. It was a plane for a war long since over, of little use against terrorism, and severely overbudget and over-inflating the pockets of private interest. Yet the businesses that made the plane or it’s parts, and the Congressmembers who received donations or had parts of the plane made in their districts, fought to keep it. This is the influence that Eisenhower is warning us of.
It’s not an EPA scientist measuring pollution or the university physics professor probing the workings of sub atomic particles, or the climate scientists warning us about warming or the biologist writing of evolution. it’s those who try to wield science in a way to put a strangle on our government, it’s polices and its budget of private gain.
Phillip:
I am critically short on time today but I feel that your reasoned answer (well, most of it is reasoned) deserves a response.
It’s a shame you have to lead with the unreasonable — and arrogant — assumption: “..Your anti-science and intellectual biases…” I have been a research assistant for many years. I began teaching Astronomy at the Miami Space Transit Planetarium at age 15. I have been an astronomy research assistant at the University of Florida and I spent several years as a lab technician at Beta Analytic, which is the world’s preeminent Carbon 14 lab. I have spent most of my life using what intellectual powers I possess making science understandable to the layman.
I don’t need to be lectured about anti-science bias. I know what science is, and what it is not. And what is coming out of East Anglia is the PRECISE OPPOSITE of science. When I learned, only through “Climategate,” that the internal algorithms of the computer models were not open to everyone you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Furthermore, you will note that I have not denied that AGW is real, or that it is serious. But the POLITICAL intersection of science has ruined the scientific method — which is a way of thinking — at least at that installation. You don’t think that’s important? I think it is CRITICAL. You cannot wield the sword of science as a politician. POLICY is separate from THEORY, RESULTS and DATA. When scientists become involved in policy decisions, you get Climategate. And you DESERVE Climategate.
Your first point about pure science versus applied science is interesting. If I have a large set of contrary data, and I am doing pure science to try to understand the cause, I do not throw that data away and try to fire publishers that agree with it. If the contrary data points are outliers I can prove that statistically. If not, then I need to modify or scrap the theory. One compelling set of repeatable data can –AND SHOULD — destroy a theory. There is nothing pure science about AGW research.
Furthermore, I utterly reject your assertion that “one kind of science” is susceptible to budgetary pressures while the other kind is not. There is only one kind of scientist, and that is the human kind. All humans make mistakes. Science, when it is allowed to work, corrects most of those mistakes. When scientists know they are right and disregard conflicting views in the manner we have seen, that is not science. That is politics.
You go on to say that “Industrial and military grants limit research potential because there is almost always an expectation of certain results.” That may or may not be true depending on the individual case, but the ENTIRE POINT of the post is to point out that “the expectation of results” is PRECISELY the effect we have seen in East Anglia CRU, and if it is there, (and given the hugely politicized nature of the other climate research centers and their directors) then it is not unfair to assume that the anti-scientific protocols seen at EACRU are present elsewhere. Given the magnitude of the change AGW proponents want to create, and given shocking anti-science activities at one of the leading AGW centers, I would say fair-minded people believe the burden is on you.
You say that “Let’s first recall Eisenhower says science should be respected, which the right has often not respected.” CATEGORICALY TRUE. It’s shameful. That doesn’t impact this argument, but it is a point well taken.
However, when you write “Unlike people in business or politics, there is a lot more self reflection by academics of their role in society” it makes me wonder: have you read what is going on at CRU? Do you not realize how completely and transparently you reveal the bias you have? Scientists certainly DO NOT spend more time on self-reflection than people in politics and business. This assertion on your part goes straight to the heart of why you cannot make your point with just the data. Self-reflection would seem to indicate that there is a problem with the data sets. CRU chose to bury that problem. A SELF-REFLECTIVE person might see that this was a problem. I am NOT saying that the conflict in data means AGW is not happening. I AM saying that a real scientists would have to modify a theory to include contrary data, rather than congratulate themselves on how self-reflective (and therefore correct)they are IN SPITE of contrary data.
Now on to defense contractors. How many do you know? Personally, I mean. How many defense workers do you have drinks and dinner with? For me, it’s quite a few. Because when you say that they have a vested interest in “there being more conflict, war, and instability,” you have shown me you have not the slightest idea what or whom you are speaking of. Yet to make such a statement goes straight to the arrogance and narcissism that got us Climategate.
Defense Contractors have dedicated their lives to making the weapons that keep a society free and safe enough so that science and poetry may thrive. GOT THAT? That’s what they do. They — unlike you — have studied history and conflict, and they — unlike you — have had enough experience out in the real world beyond the bubble of freedom and security that you have spent your life in to know that bad things and bad people are out there trying to get in. They don’t need to be slandered by the likes of you, no matter how subsconciously you do it.
Furthermore, you specific criticism of the F-22 as “a plane for a war long since over, of little use against terrorism,” shows a remarkably poor understanding of the modern battlespace and furthermore carries the same short-sighted arrogance common in scientists: namely, the idea that they way things are now, politically, is the way things will always be. If China, or even Vladimir Putin decides to do something, on his own and for his own demented reasons, then we are left with a choice between A.) fleet of F-22’s or B.) your assurances that those wars are long over. I’ll take A.) I’m not arrogant enough to say what type of wars will never be fought again.
Scientists are good at detecting patterns. Detecting a pattern here, are we Phillip?
November 9th, 2009 1:55 pm
[I have just returned from five days at Guantanamo Bay. I was expecting to be blown away at the quality of the people I would meet there, but I was not prepared for how far they went beyond my high initial expectations. I'll have a Veteran's Day Afterburner about the experience by Wednesday morning. Until then, please conside this a small token of my undying respect and admiration for our retired and active duty military personnel. They are beyond my ability to describe. But I will try.
This was the first thing I ever posted online. It originally appeared through the kindness of Steven Den Beste at USS Clueless. Steven was writing about the American military, and I wrote this to him as soon as I returned from my father's funeral at Arlington. I'm very grateful to Steven for having published it in its entirety (and his subsequent support of Eject! Eject! Eject!), because this small essay, and the response it received from you fine people, is what got me writing.
Thanks, Steven -- you are missed. And thanks especially to all of you for the support and encouragement. I never knew life could be this good, and I owe that to all of you. -- BW]
On October 7th, 2002 I returned to Los Angeles from Arlington National Cemetery where we interred my father, 2nd Lt. William Joseph Whittle, who died from what may have been sheer joy during a fishing trip in Canada.
My dad served in the US Army in Germany, from 1944 through 1946. He was an intelligence officer, and was responsible for recording the time of death of the convicted War Criminals at Nuremburg after the war. He saw them hanged — he stood there with a stopwatch. He was 21 years old.
My father spent two years in the U.S. Military. He spent a lifetime in the corporate world. After twenty years as a world-class hotel manager, turning entire properties from liabilities into assets, he was let go without so much as a thank-you dinner or a handshake. Twenty years of service. He was a four-star general in the corporate world for two decades, and that was his reward.
Monday afternoon, at 1 pm, I stood underneath the McClellan arch at ANC. There were 13 family members there. There were also 40 men in uniform. I was stunned.
They took my dad’s ashes, in what looked like a really nice cigar box (what a little box for such a big man, I thought at that moment), and placed it in what looked like a metallic coffin on the back of a horse drawn caisson. His ashes were handled by other twenty-one year old men, men whose fathers were children when my dad was in uniform. Everything was inspected, checked, and handled with awesome, palpable, radiating reverence and respect.
As we walked behind the caisson, the band played not a dirge, but a march…a tune that left me searching for the right adjective, which I didn’t find until the flight home. It was TRIUMPHAL. It was the sound you make when you bring a hero home. It was the only time during the service that I really began to cry.
My father received a military funeral: the folded flag, the 21 gun salute, the honor guard, and a Chaplain named Crisp who declared a grateful nation was welcoming their brother William home to rest among heroes.
My dad served for two years. He wrote on the back of his Army officer class graduation photo that he expected to die fighting for his country within a few months. Most everybody who signed his photo wrote the same thing.
The chaplain said, looking my stepmom in the eyes like this was the first time he’d ever said the words, that the men and women buried here had agreed to lay down their lives for their country and each other, and that THIS, not rank, or social status, or length in service, is what entitled them to be buried in America’s most sacred ground.
Before the ceremony, I was looking at the headstones, and it’s sad how each area of Arlington is like a forlorn vintage: here are buried the veterans who died around 1995, there is the 1982 vintage, the mid-fifties crop over on yonder hill. And standing between a Major and a Lt. Colonel, I saw a headstone for a PFC who was born in 1979, the year I entered college, and who had died in 1998. This young man, not even twenty, couldn’t have been in the service for more than a few months, and yet there he lay, with the same headstone as colonels and majors and the many, many sergeants that cover those fields.
That is American honor, and no where else in the world does it exist in such a naked, magnificent form. Each of these men and women, this band of brothers, receiving the same heartfelt respect. For my father, who died at age 77, it was the honoring of a contract he had signed more than half a century before, defending Europe and helping bring those criminal bastards to justice. It was a contract paid in full, one that has given my family and me an indescribable sense of comfort and pride.
As we were leaving, it dawned on me that the ugly brown-grey building I had been looking at across the road looked suddenly familiar. I asked the funeral coordinator if that was, in fact, the Pentagon, and he replied that it was…indeed, it was the side that the aircraft struck.
On September 11, 2001, this man was about to conduct a morning service on a hill about 1/2 mile from that brown-grey wall. He heard a roar and a whine, saw a silver blur fifty feet above his head, and watched as a 757 immolated itself against the side of the Pentagon. It was my unpleasant duty to inform him that a book claiming that the plane crash never happened, but was rather an intelligence service plot, had become one of the best-selling books in France, the country my father and millions of other American’s were willing to die for in order to liberate as young men.
My mother remains, to this day, a proud British Subject, the daughter of a man Awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1954 for his service in the Royal Marines. She, my grandfather and uncle were nearly murdered by Egyptian mobs during the Suez crisis, and she is fiercely proud of both of her native country and the one she married into. Yet she said that nowhere in the world do ordinary servicemen or women receive anything like this level of honor and respect and reverence, and she is right. All nations honor their generals and heroes. This nation honors privates and sergeants in indistinguishable fashion.
Walking behind the flag-draped caisson of an Army 2nd Lieutenant that day, I felt that my father was receiving the funeral of the President of the United States. And, number of people on the parade route aside, as a matter of fact, he was.
