School Spirit and World War Three

After going for over a year with out a victory in football, the team from Layton High won a game. It was before school starts, Friday night, a non-league one, when nobody was watching, but it was still a win. The first week of school went by with the regularity of ritual which makes watching it the definition of deja vu. At the opening assembly, the Lancer rose from the mist. It is one of the sweetest bits of luck that the mascot of the school at which I teach is the Roman Lancer. So year after year, with tears of pride starting in my eyes and heart rushing with enthusiasm, I watch the breastplate clad and helmet masked hero rise from the fog covered stage; search out his lance and shield; and mount the steps between the columns to raise his arms in triumph. The strobe light pulses, the music soars, and the crowd roars. On this particular fall morning as we sat, still tingling with “school spirit”, the captain of the football team stepped to the podium. Perhaps I saw him as beautiful because of the way I was feeling at the moment. Maybe it was the result of long weeks of working out under the hot summer sun, but as he stood there with his shaggy mane, shirt stretched tight by muscles, he was beautiful. But more that the way he looked it was the purity of his humility that made a sob rise in my throat. He thanked everyone for their support, and then with quiet dignity he made a promise. “I can’t promise you we will win tonight,’ he said, “but I promise we will do our best.” I thought the tiles would peel off the sealing, torn free by the sonic blast of cheers and applause. I had never felt more pride in being a Lancer. Our team won the game that night. The stands were filled, I was even there, or at least playing with my children on the lawn beside the bleachers. That next week we had a pep rally, again! We cheered and stomped in the gym; and our school’s new, young coach, called “Buns” by the girls in his classes, spoke of the return of the glory days to Layton football. Sure enough, that Friday night brought another stunning Lancer victory. The newspaper referred to us as “that upstart suburban school.” It was good to be alive! And that week; another pep rally. This one much more elaborate – no doubt Buns was earning his keep! This time we met in the auditorium and once more the strobe lights pulsed, the music blasted. But what a wail of anger, boos, and hisses, filled the air as the “Weber Warrior”, complete with red cape and large W painted in red on his bare chest rose from the mist and mounted the “marble” steps. He stood between the papier-mâché columns and shook his sword at us. The wails of anger and dismay turned to a defining shout of joy as a swirl of fog revealed “The Lancer”, muscles bulging beneath cape and plate, rose to defend our honor. Spear raised and shield advanced he marched up the stairs. The Warrior crumbled beneath the Lancer’s advance and, accompanied by an explosive burst of joy and lust, he walked across the Warrior’s prostrate body to turn and lift his arms in weapon brandishing triumph!!!! The shouts of Kill, Kill were straight from Lord of the Flies. Now as our sun-tinted and muscle covered quarterback stood to speak, there was no hint of humility in his delivery. He trumpeted past victories, and punctuated by wild acclamation, described the destruction our superior training and “Lancer Pride” would reek on Weber that night. It was a bit much. I looked about; mine were not the only eyes nervously downcast. But the gods seemed to overlook our hubris. That night the Warriors were trampled; Buns’ head grew bigger than his backside. Monday morning’s announcements brought a play by play description of “our” victory. At the end of the narrative the voice panting over the intercom intoned, “We’re Layton Football, and we’re back.” The gods rolled their eyes and smiled, and so did I. That week’s pep-rally was something I had never seen at Layton. We all assembled on the football field, packing the “home side” bleachers. The dancing girls danced, the cheer leaders exhorted us to kill the Darts, and the band played on! At last Buns rose to speak to us. Did we really display the awe he deserved? There was no young quarterback with stretched tan skin and a sun streaked bush of hair; this speech could not be trusted to a boy. The coach himself took the mike. Buns told us how much we hated Davis High, how all our dreams of greatness had been trampled by their unworthy deceptions of football glory. He told us how the people who moved to Mutton Hollow just to call their children Darts would soon regret their high priced houses; how truth and justice would at last prevail, revealed to the universe by another stunning Lancer Victory. “And,” he cried, “Tonight, when we have broken their dreams and crushed their team, we invite you all to come down onto their football field and dance our victory dance, and RUIN THEIR HOMECOMING!!!! If the sky could have cracked, it might have. The cheers were that loud. I was at the game that night. My family squeezed into Davis High’s visitor bleachers, among the masses and amid the splashes of brown and gold. By halftime, there was no joy “in Mudville”; not, at least, on the Lancer side of town. The score was 20+ to two, when the Davis Marching band took the field. Every kid in Kaysville must have been in that band; all but the football team. Back and forth and round and round they marched. The west side bleachers rose to their feet as the Darts sang their school song and then the band member executed brown and yellow patterns on the field. A young man began a celebratory lap around the green grass field. He held high a long silken banner, brown and yellow, and it streamed behind him in the wind of his speed. It sparkled in the bright lights of the football field. As he passed the Layton bench there was a flash of blue and blue. The team was not on the field, so it must have been some pep person, a representative in student government, or a Buns toddy that tackled the color bearer and brought him down. Police and sheriff’s deputies rushed the field, every vice principal in Utah converged on the spot, and out of nowhere Mini Cam Five from KSL TV appeared to record it all for the evening news. I can’t remember the final score. It didn’t matter; no Lancers danced that night. The next Monday, the vice principal came to visit me. Rather an honor, as I now look back. He was a good friend; his children had worked for me at camp. He had tears in his eyes as he talked to me. “How,” he asked, “how could anyone embarrass our school like that? On state wide TV?” I replied, “Have you been to our own pep rallies?” To me the embarrassment was not the issue. Even worse than this specific “tackle on the field” was the week after week bitterness and dislike that is routinely spawned between schools and communities in the name of school spirit. I am particularly saddened by the fights that go on after games. Here students who have put no effort into developing skills to make the school and themselves “proud” gather, to pick fights and bully and beat up on kids, always weaker and smaller than themselves; behaving shamefully to redeem their “honor”. I was not, am not, innocent, when debate season came I couldn’t help making my dig – at the football team at least. Hoping Buns was listening, I ended each Monday morning announcements of the Debate Team’s successes of the weekend with the line, “We’re Layton Debate, and we never left!!!!”

Let me pose some questions about School Spirit:

1. What role does competition play in developing feelings of love and support for your school? (Think country)

2. Can we have competition without competitors? (Think victories without enemies)

3. How does it improve us to tear down our advisories? (Think France or Russia or China)

4. Are there other ways to promote excellence and school spirit than in picking fights? (Think!!!)

5. What if the kids that attend “Davis” attended our school? How would we feel about them? (What if we lived in Mexico?)

A point of interest might be to note that Layton’s number one rival is North Ridge High – when I started teaching at Layton half the kids at Layton lived in the part of town that would someday attend North Ridge.

Now let’s turn our attention to the hate and rivalry that places the world in daily danger. Some will argue that Nationalism came into existence at the end of the Napoleonic era, others that its seeds were sown during the Hundred Years War. I tend to believe that Abraham was a nationalist; that nationalism drove the Roman Empire; that every Greek City State throbbed with nationalism. Be that as it may; let’s consider Nationalism. My thesis is that there are TWO VIEWS OF NATIONALISM. I will present them in outline form, hoping our readers will fill in all the blanks in dialogue.

I. Nationalism based on Emotional, Romantic, and Relativist Ideas such as:

A. Factors:
1. Religion
2. Race
3. Ethnicity
4. Mythology

B. Examples:
1. Balkanization
2. European History since the fall of Rome
3. Genocide/Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda
4. France
5. Collapse of the USSR
6. Chechzen separatism
7. Pakistan vs. India since independence
8. Anti- Semitism
9. Palestinian Terrorism
10. Zionism

C. Negative effects on many aspects of history:
1. Crusades
2. Jihads
3. Inquisition/Reconquista
4. Imperialism
5. African Slavery
6. Extermination of the American Indians
7. The failure of the British Empire
8. The disintegration of the USSR
9. Genocide in Tibet

II. Nationalism based on Reasonable, Classic, Enlightenment, and Absolutist Ideas:

A. Factors:
1. Cicero’s ideas that gods and men are all one commonwealth
2. Equality before the law (civil rights) – freedom of religion, speech, assembly, press, etc.
3. Human rights _ Life Liberty< Property, etc. The separation of Church and State; integration of opportunity of all regardless of race, color, creed, gender, sexual preference, etc. See George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address.

B. Examples:
1. The positive side of many of the World’s “great religions” Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, etc.
2. Hellenistic Culture
3. Pax Romana
4. The United States of America
5. Free enterprise
6. Scientific advancements – agriculture and medicine
7. America’s sacrifice to save the world from Fascism, Communism, and Islamic Fundamentalist Terror.

III. Conclusion: There has only been one successful multinational (ethnic) state in the modern world – The United States. This was made possible by setting aside the Relative definitions of Nationalism and adopting a reverence for and allegiance to the ideas of the Enlightenment which are universally applicable to all people. We are thus approaching a new world order, Cicero’s Commonwealth of men and gods.

The Filibuster: The Last Gasp of Relativism

Saturday night I spent some very valuable time with my Philosophy Professor: He is a Relativist disciple of Wittgenstein. He proceeded to divide the debaters of the world into rationalists, and empiricists. He sketched out a chart to help the "old man". Introducing me to knowledge “a priori” and “a posteriori". Once he explained the whole system of Rationalism and Empiricism and how one discovers A Priori knowledge by instinct but A Posteriori knowledge through scence experenct, he reduced the world of truth into analytical and synthetic logic, with premis leading to premis. I asked him to please tell me how understanding all this – which I did not pretend to do, would help me answer any of the important questions that I needed answers to. He demanded an example of such a question. “Is the war in Iraq just?” I asked ( I could have asked if Bush's judges should get a vote.) He asked me why I needed to know about the justice of the war. I explained that I needed to know if I should support it or not. “Then," he asked, “don’t you need to know if one should support just wars?" Here I told him that to me that knowledge was a priori. "What if someone disagreeded?" he demanded. I said, “Then they must be misguided.” But he explained that a priori knowledge didn’t need explaining, it was like 2 + 2 = 4. I reminded him of how he had really not always known that; that at one time a teacher had laid out the blocks and got him to remember that truth. I claimed that had he been asked the right questions he would have remembered that just wars must be fought. But I asked, "If that is not true how does your chart help me to understand that?" Then the argument started going round and round. We were in filibuster. Every time I asked if “the war was just” he would ask me to define justice. When I offered a definition he told me it was “not interesting.” I asked him for a definition and got a lot of talk about “cats on mats” and 2 + 2 = 4 and he wondered at the number of rocks on the top of a hypothetical mountain. My Professor then insisted that he knew “2 + 2= 4” instinctively but had had to be taught about justice; that in some other world justice might be something else than it is here. He told me that P and not P cannot be, but that my belief that “freedom was worth fighting for" depended on how I had been taught. I, of course, disagreed. He told me that I had read my Plato and falling in love, I told him he was enamored of his WSU professors and the writings of Kant. He said that no one had to prove to anyone that “p” and “not p” could not be; I told him that before anyone existed man had a right to be free. In the end the discussion stalled. He is still my dearest friend but tired of argument we said goodnight with no answer on the justice of the war. Thus when I had forced an end to the filibustered – when argument came to an end and I called for a vote, he took his balls and went home. The Democrats are similarly bound to circular agreements; as are relativists and the empiricists at all. . When absolutists, rationalists, seek to understand the justice of a war they are fighting, relativists want to talk of the nature of killing, when rational folk want to defend the life of the dieing, relativists want to redefine death, when believers in eternal truths try to deal with politics those who name truth as they see it want to quote Aristotle – and if "we" disagree with the quote and call of a vote, "they" take their balls and go.

By way of ilistration let me give an example. I had a very different sort argument with a friend the other day. He claimed that if he had known what Hitler was to become before he had come to power, he would have been justified in killing Hitler before he had committed any crime. This is a very different way to argue than charts and make believe mountain rocks. I told him I thought he was wrong about killing Hitler and then I told him why. He may or may not have been converted by the power of the arguments that followed; he may yet offer some counter ones to try to bring me round to his way of seeing things; but we will be debating the issue and in the end those who have listened will cast their vote by how they see the truth.

Here were my arguments against “prior restraint” even on Hitler. Until Hitler had done anything wrong, there was no justice in apprehending or killing him. What should have happened was preventing his rise to power in the first place. Once he had accomplished that, the world should have acted on his first violation of justice and removed him from power. Much could and should have been done beforehand to prevent “Hitler”. America should have followed Woodrow Wilson and “made the world safe for Democracy” at the first of the last century! There should have been no treaty of Versailles with the subsequent reparations, collapse of the German economy, and world-wide depression. Having said this, there was no excuse for the path Hitler chose. The time to stop Hitler was when he committed his first act of “illegal” aggression. When he began German rearmament, he should have been stopped, when he seized Austria, he should have been thrown out, when he demanded Czechoslovakia, he should have been brought to London in chains. Again – there is little point in re-fighting WWII but what we must realize is that before Hitler committed a crime he was innocent and could not be judged by any prophesy of the future. (You might consider watching a movie called “The Minority Report”.)

Now let’s apply our reasoning to our nation’s present problem. When Osama Bin Laden first murdered Americans, he should have been stopped. When the Saudi Princes offered him to Clinton, Clinton should have had the courage to take him down. When Saddam first violated the terms of his surrender in the First Gulf War, the United Nations should have brought him to justice. Under Clinton none of these things happened.

What if there had been no Churchill to face down Hitler? We can only speculate on what a continuance of the appeasement of Hitler would have wrought. What if Britain would have handed over Poland and France? What if the US would have stood by and allowed Stalin’s USSR to starve? What if on Pear Harbor Day, America would have handed the Japanese Hawaii and crawled back to the coast?

What if Clinton or Gore would have been in the White House when Osama came knocking? Perhaps confronted by such an atrocity even they would have acted, but I am not hopeful. Within weeks of 9/11 Clinton gave a speech blaming America for the attack, and Gore has claimed that the war on terror has been a betrayal of America. Even as the U.N. sank into its own refuse, Kerry wanted to hand it a veto over American action. Perhaps under such “leadership” the world would have seen the Islamic Super State from Spain to Indonesia. Would there now be the fanatic’s dream of a nuclear weapon armed monster whose purpose would be world wide domination and the extermination of all who do not bend the knee? We will never know. What we do know is that, at last, the free peoples of the world drew the lines and the armed forces of the US paid the price for our freedom. Now in thr “relative” safety of the world such sacrifice has preserved, those politicians who want power in the U.S. are willing to condemn as unnecessary the war which has kept them free. Here is a place for discussion, but leave the P’s and Q’s out of it.

So I await Rumpole’s reply, or perhaps some discussion from Shadow, or Silver Lining, Areas, Apollo, or some legal instruction from DannyBoy or Aeneas, some light from any anonymous, or any of you who so kindly read and post. Here in the Agora we call for debate and no mandatory 60% conscientious is needed before discussion can go on. To dodge the topic by name calling and “scholarly head wagging” will not serve, and refusing to participate does no one any good. Thus we see the tactics of the opposition reveled. When reason deserts them, when the truth calls for action, they can ether filibuster or go home.

Dancing the Pelosi Two Step

Once more we see the “magic” power of relativism as Democrats scream obscenity out of both sides of their political mouth at once. While attacking John Bolton for criticizing the incompetence and corruption of the United Nations they pretend to attack “corruption” in the US congress in the person of the Majority Whip – Tom DeLay.

Let’s review the attack on Bolton. Accusations against him come down to these petty and unfounded complaints:

1. Bolton intimidating intel professionals. While screaming for the total destruction of the US intelligence community, liberals – led by that little caustic congresswoman from San Francisco – are angry at Bolton for questioning the opinion of some low level nameless bureaucracy?

2. Bolton is a grouchy boss. Having often been accused of being a grouchy boss by people who were incompetent and unworthy of their positions – I am not surprised that a successful administrator would stir the ire of some underling. What is amazing is that Bolton, who has been forced to interact with a host of agenda driven liberals at the State Department, has been so tolerant.

3. Bolton is critical of the UN; suggesting that it is of lesser significance than the United States in the world. Whoa – Talk about being challenged for saying the obvious! The UN, dripping scandal from the criminal and dangerous mishandling of the Iraq Oil for Food program, has further sullied their integrity by covering up child sexual abuse perpetrated by their operatives in Africa. At the moment the Genocide in Sudan goes on unabated by the impotent UN presence in the country. Proof, if there was ever any needed, of the legitimacy of President Bush’s decision to act in Iraq without full UN support. Again I remind you that UN action was blocked by France and Russia both of whom were being bribed by Saddam with the money the UN was leaking and kicking back to that Monster. The failure of the UN everywhere in the world is a justifiable reason for criticism from John Bolton – and a reason for the world to support the appointment of a US ambassador who is willing to deal with the failing of the UN rather than perpetuating and covering them up to curry support from the Liberal Media, and the French! I remind you that the only power France has in the world is their veto in the UN. France is sinking so fast that the rats can’t find a place to jump from! If anything, Bolton has been to kind to the UN – and his restraint should indicate that he will make a sincere effort to reform rather than destroy the organization.

Let’s now consider the De Lay circus:

1. Tom DeLay has not committed any crime – had he done so he would surely have paid the penalty. He has hired people from his own family to help in his campaign. Who would have been better choices? I have often hired my family members. They have consistently been among my most valuable employees. There is no law or even convention against it. More hot air to boil the teapot. The Democrats and their supporters in the Media are truly creating a tempest in a teapot in the hopes of helping their political chances in the 06 congressional elections. They are so desperate that they have to throw mud scraped from the grave of Terry Schiavo. The real reason the Democrats are attacking DeLay is his constitutional success in redistricting Texas in a way that allows the majority of Texans to have true representation in the Congress.

2. Pelosi – has been found guilty of crimes in the House – she has been fined $26,000 for improperly using campaign donations to support the campaigns of representatives which then voted her in as minority leader. Her pot is so black that she can’t see the kettle.


3. When asked in a news conference to explain her double standard, Pelosi and Senator Reed of Arizona, who was with her before the press, replied that they were there to talk about Tom DeLay.


Meanwhile the Democrats led by their screaming Dean, continue to disparage American success in Iraq, villainize the President’s efforts to reform the admittedly broken Social Security System, and stonewall against the constitutionally prescribed advice and consent responsibility of the Senate to vote on Presidential appointments and judicial recommendations. Read, Dean, Pelosi and company have nothing to offer to help our country or the world. They offer up constant hatred and endless sniping against anything that might bring success to America or credit to our government. With two mouths going you would think the Democrats would have something good to say about America; you would think!

NOTE: Rules that are not good should be changed. Cases in point:

1. Sixty vote majority in order to vote on a presidential appointment or judges.

2. House ethics committee policy that allows either party to prolong investigations for partisan reasons. A majority should be required to maintain an investigation of ethics in the house past a reasonable time.

All We Are Is Dust in the Wind, Dude

Achilles did not choose immortality. He longed for home, wife, and children. He hoped his grandchildren would remember him and then he would be gone. But Fate had it differently. For love of a friend, Achilles struck the blow that would shake and shape the world. Since that day, many have been tempted to be Achilles, to live forever in the soul, body, and consciousness of man. Man or Myth, Achilles drives us all.

John Paul the Second is dead. This week we watched the “greatest funeral of all time” and then went on with life. Has John Paul II changed us forever? In 3,200 years will men read his story and be filled with wonder?

A Soviet author, Lydia Chukovskaya, a forgotten writer from a now forgotten country, tells how the communist party “faithful” struggled to support that forgotten dream. In the story “the party ladies”, Sophia Petrovna and Natasha, spend a day decorating for the “New Year’s” celebration. They decorated the “New Year’s Tree” with red stars and Stalinist slogans. Beneath the tree, Sophia carefully arranged the Baby Lenin in his manger box and the gifts the baby Lenin will “bring” the children. In the midst of all their “New Year’s joy”, both women are consumed by their love for the same child, Koya, Sophia’s son and Natasha’s lover. When the communist monster takes Koya away, the child Linen and the Christ Child too, are rendered meaningless. In the horrible ending of the story, Natasha disappears and Sophia is forced to forget her son.

As a history teacher I spend a lot of time making lists of men and women; folks who sought immortality in the twentieth century might include:

Teddy Roosevelt
Baden Powel
William II
Woodrow Wilson
Lenin
FDR
Hitler
Mussolini
Tojo
Joe Stalin
Mao
Winston Churchill
Macarthur
Gandhi
JFK
Gorbechov
Ronald Regan
Bush and Bush
And what’s his name
John Paul Two
And me
And you.

Where have all the heroes and monsters gone? Even the gods grow dim. Wouldn’t it be best to share Achilles dream and not his fate; to have family and friends, to know our grandchildren, and then be gone?

In the end there is only Achilles and fate, the rest of us are dust in the wind, dude.

Baghdad Bob Is Still in Business!

New York Times shock columnist, Bob Herbert, has taken up the cause and tactics of Saddam’s ex-communications director, Baghdad Bob. In a March 19th column, Bob revealed that the ACLU is initiating a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld. Their client is an Iraqi named Arkan Mohammed Ali. Ali claims to have been: stabbed, shocked, beaten, hooded, striped naked, urinated on, and buried alive. The ACLU joins seven other former detainees and the Human Rights First group in the suit. They claim that Secretary Rumsfeld personally authorized unlawful interrogation techniques. Herbert excoriates Rumsfeld without evidence and surely without proof. He vaguely references “a myriad [of] newspaper and magazine articles”, none of which he quotes, he mentions “U.S. government reports”, none of which he sites, and “such reputable groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross”. He does not tell us what the supposed authorities have to say about Rumsfeld, nor does he explain why he might consider the International Committee of the Red Cross a reputable group.

It is disheartening to me that Baghdad Bob “II” refuses to give Donald Rumsfeld; a man who has done more than most to protect Mr. Herbert and the ACLU’s freedoms; the same “innocent until proven guilty” defense they demanded for Michael Jackson and the terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. Realizing that any half-baked or vengeful idiot can shark up a lawyer to file a law suit; I challenge the motivation of these litigants and their propagandists in the “Media”. Their motivation is to condemn the administration, the Secretary of Defense, and our military. Once again, filled with “Bush hate”, they inspire the assault on America.

I maintain that Donald Rumsfeld has done a great deal to protect and spread the blessings of freedom thoughout the world. Remember when and where it was that our military failed. Under Bill Clinton, our troops were driven, tail between their legs, from Mogadishu; America stood by while at least half a million Rwandans were hacked to death by machetes; it took 250,000 murders in the former Yugoslavia before Clinton, concerned for his legacy, took action. When a bunch of drunken hoods turned back the US Marine Corps in Haiti, Bin Laden made his decision. Bin Laden believed that the cowards in charge of America’s government during the Clinton adminitration were representative of all Americans. Hence he set in motion the bombing of our embassies in Africa, our ships in the Red Sea, and our citizens in New York and Washington D.C. But on 9/11 the enemies of American found out there was a different administration in power. A very important part of that administration was and is Donald Rumsfeld.

Whenever I hear groups like the ACLU, the International Red Cross, Human Rights First, or their lackeys in the media attacking Rumsfeld, I recall the claims they made in the days before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With eager confidence they told us that America would be defeated by the Taliban; after all the left’s heroes – the USSR - had been. It was interesting to note at the time that the "News" Magazine articles predicting the defeat of America in Afghanistan came out on the stands after the surrender of the Taliban. Victory in Afghanistan came so quickly that the Media "know-it-alls" couldn’t even pull their fraudulent stories in time to print reports of America’s success. Perhaps you remember the left’s predictions that America's army in Iraq would be bogged down and slaughtered along the banks of the Euphrates. The left predicted 20,000 American deaths in the days before our troops were thrown back into the sea. It never happened – so the enemies of American have had to cook up new definitions of failure, new exaggerated disasters, to support their design of embarrassing America. Rather than showing America’s military and its leaders the respect and gratitude they are due, the ACLU, the Human Rights First group, and the New York Times set about to use the courts to raise yet another false screen of stomach-turning propaganda to shame the United States in the eyes of the world.

I might not know everything about America's War on Terror, but if the world the ACLU and Baghdad Bob II hope for comes to be, none of us will be here to discuss it.

The Trial and Death of Terry Schiavo: To Kill a Mockingbird

Socrates died unjustly, but he died in obedience to the law. Five hundred and one citizen jurors decided his fate and he would not flee the consequence of their folly. The judicial murder of Socrates demonstrates that legal injustice is nothing new.

Let’s examine the termination of Terry Schiavo with this thought in mind.

First of all – everything done as this tragedy has unfolded has been legal according to the small “ l ” sort of law; the laws that are made by men and placed on the books of the Florida state and the American federal governments. The state judge acted under the law by declaring Mike Schiavo, Terry’s guardian. According to Florida law, the Guardian does have the power to dictate the fate of a helpless person if that person has not taken the opportunity to let their own will be known in a written document. The Congress of the United States had the duty to pass a law mandating the federal court to review the case. The President of the United States followed the law of the land when he signed the bill passed by the Congress. Once in the federal court the federal judges followed the law when they chose to uphold the original ruling concerning Mike Schiavo’s authority over the life and death of his wife. The Governor of Florida followed the statues of the state when he asked a department of social welfare to intervene. The Florida judge acted legally when he placed an injunction on saving Terry’s life until after he has ruled on its legality. And on and on it goes.

Secondly – many heart-wrenching truths and conjectures make this a challenging situation to the consciences of observers. These include:

1. There is no way of knowing Terry’s true desires in this situation.

2. Mike Schiavo has acted in a way that questions the quality of his guardianship.

3. Terry’s condition is open to interpretation and debate.

Thirdly – The law has neither a heart nor a conscience; its course is not dictated by truth or justice

As I have read and discussed the Trial and Death of Socrates I have often wished I could have been there. I have wondered if I might have saved him. The truth is that I could not have stopped his poisoning any more than he was able to. The law demanded obedience. However, I have long rejoiced in the belief that, had Socrates been accused of “disrespecting the gods of the state”, “teaching false gods”, and “corrupting the youth” in an American court, he would have been acquitted. I believe that centuries of reflection on truth and justice have crafted laws that would have done right by Socrates.

I found myself helpless in my desire to spare the life of Terry Schiavo. I look upon her cruel death with all the disgust I hold for the hemlock that killed the “best of men”. I call for an examination of the small “ l ” law that could force such injustice. We must reexamine this death so that, in future, we might align our legal power with the right. To make this transition I call for two maturing evolutions to our system.

First, we must make a careful examination of the role of the courts in our government. Like the two hundred and fifty one votes that decided every case in ancient Athens, our present judiciary seeks to place itself above all other authority. There must be a reexamination of judicial supremacy. The law is not solely the province of the courts and to pretend it is places the natural rights of citizens in jeopardy to the caprice of an oligarchy of diploma touting tyrants. The separation of powers was originally intended to be between the President (the monarchy) the Senate (the Aristocracy) and the House of Representatives (the people – the democracy). The creation of a court of last resort in the judiciary is an extra Constitutional concoction of the courts themselves. Their elevation from the subordinate role spelled out in the Constitution, to that of equal (even superior) to the elected representatives of the people; is something that needs to be carefully reexamined in the light of this week’s disaster.

Secondly – a careful examination of the unalienable right we call life is demanded. Modern technology and medicine have vastly extended the possibilities of life. Those who crafted our government to defend life did not comprehend the ambiguity that would engulf the term. Like a rising tide, possibilities have swamped the simple “on\off” switch marked life and death. Man’s every evolving abilities have created in our present world a problem of understanding which must be clarified if truth and justice are to be obtained.

I close by asking you to think about the story presented in To Kill a Mockingbird. Remember that the folks of Macomb, GA accepted without too much question the "facts" of the law. Black men could not be trusted, white jurors could not doubt a white man or trust a black one. Are we to be like Jem and Scout, and in a childlike way accept the failings of our legal system, or are we to take the broader lesson of Lee’s warning and reach out for truth and justice. I can’t help but think that most Americans would choose not to live like Boo, but not knowing “Boo’s” will, isn’t it a sin to kill a mockingbird?

Marx Is Dead - Privatize the World

My students and I have been discussing the effects and impacts of the Industrial Revolution. With the Bush Social Security Personal Accounts in mind . . . wouldn’t it be wonderful if the enormous aggregation of energy, resources, and capital produced by the twentieth century were to have a result that was the exact opposite from Marx’s prediction? Wouldn’t it be one of the sweetest ironies in history if through the privatization of Social Security – made possible by the gigantic surplus of wealth produced by industrialization -- a bourgeois world appeared? Rather than the human economy evolving into a socialist super state were the individual disappears and where no one owns anything, what if there is created a society were each individual has enough wealth to live as he pleases and where, after a life time of ease and progress, he can pass his fortune on to his heirs?

Democrat Party - D. P. - Despise and Prevent

It is painful to see a party once considered progressive; a political force once famous for caring “for the little guy”; my father’s party; decay into a spiteful monster determined to prevent anything that might bring success to American. Here are some examples you might consider:

1. Democrats will stop at nothing to support abortion on demand (call it the right to kill) -*- How they must despise the unborn to be so determined to prevent their birth. The most helpless of human beings – the voiceless unborn - have no defense against the judicial legislation of Democrat appointed judges who, as Democrats once fought to support slave owners right to property over black peoples right to liberty, now fight for a “woman’s right” to choose death for a baby over that baby’s right to life.

2. Democrats and their appointed judicial lackeys block the law of the land and the will of loving parents to force the removal of Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube - *-With no way of knowing what Ms Schiavo wants Democrats opt for her death. Democrats demonstrate how they despise life and are determined to prevent it even though this means the most gruesome sort of suffering – slow and agonizing death by thrust and starvation. To “right to kill Democrats”, if a person has no voice they have no right to life. Democrats fear that Terry’s voiceless cry might call attention to the 1,000,000 other children cut off each year from their feeding tubes while in the womb. Realize, if our prison wardens killed by thirst and starvation the murdering terrorists that have slaughtered our heroes and assaulted our nation, those wardens would be justly condemned as Monsters. Yet judges, legislating their despite for this precious life, seek to prevent Terry from living. The President has called for “erring” on the side of life. Just to prevent Bush from saving a life Democrats find themselves cheering for death by torture.

3. Democrats seek to stop drilling for oil in ANWR and elsewhere in the Artic Oil Reserve -*- While our enemies rejoice in our economic challenges and seek to override our prosperity by withholding or overcharging for fuel, the Democrats attempt to prevent Americ from using its own resources. Democrats do this because they despise American success, success that will bring vindication to George Bush and force the Democrat's failed policies into the wilderness.

4. Democrats, who despise President Bush, are determined to prevent him from saving Social Security -*- While admitting that the security of future generations is in danger Democrats, and I quote Nancy P. from CA, call out to, “stop, stop, stop! the reform of Social Security.” Here we see bitter Democrats poking holes in our national lifeboat in an attempt to drown the captain!

5. To defend their last foothold of unjust power Democrats unconstitutionally block the up or down vote on Judges appointed by the President. George Bush was chosen by a clear majority in open and free elections. If his picks as judges are unfit for service, Democrats can prove this in open debate. Knowing they have no case Democrats seek by subterfuge to prevent the will of the people, the President, and the Majority of the senate. American wants the Senate to confirm Judges that will strictly interpret the Constitution rather than legislate from the bench. Democrats, knowing their last hold on power is to control judges, seek to keep the judiciary in the hands of their cronies. Thus they despise and prevent the progress of the Senate.

6. Most painfully, Democrats do everything they can to destory success and discover failure in Iraq. Remembering their last great victory at despise and prevent - the Vietnam anti war movement - they seek to drag our nation back down the road of self doubt and dismay. Despising President Bush they seek to prevent the spread of freedom.

Democrats need to return to their roots – to the needs of the “little guy”, to the defense of the weak as they seek to do right. The White House and the Congress have been placed in the hands of the Republican Party by the American people. If the Democrats believe this was a mistake they can do and say the things necessary to convince the voters to vote for them, but they do not. Bankrupt of ideas, bereft of morality, and sinking daily further and further towards irrelevance and extinction they have chosen to Despise and Prevent!

Enviro-Jihad

Last Week's WSU class covered Environmental Revolution. I had "faced" the "instructor" before. In a seminar on Eco-terrorism she had justified spiking trees and burning down sky lodges by claiming that 100 species a day are going extinct. I had asked her to name the last species which had become extinct. She said she didn’t know. I asked her to name any species which had gone extinct since the passenger pigeon. She could not. She said these lists were kept somewhere. Where? I asked.. She sugested the web sittes of several activist groops. My son later explained to me how environmentalists come up with the estimated "100 species a day extinct" number. They dig through the ruins of a harvested rain forest tree and see how many creatures they can discover that they don’t have a name for. They then assume these were new and unique species and that now their tree is gone they are extinct. Multiply that number of species by the number of trees cut down a day and you come up with the per-day number of species becomeing extinct. Weard isn’t it!?!

This week the professor unleashed her assault on America and modernization. An attack which probably goes over wonderfully well with the entranced "tweens" of her WSU classes. There were many flashes in the running two hour battle that the “discussion” developed into. Here I note only the climax. She handed round a “quiz”. It was a Sierra Club survey from the January/February 2003 Sierra magazine. It claimed to be able to determine how many acres of land one requires to live. No effort was expended in explaining the rational behind any of the formulas: – vegens are scored at 0.46 while those who almost always eat meat get a 1.14, a person who eats unpackaged local food is graded at 0.69 while those who eat out of package imports rate a 1.1. Then these numbers are run through a mysterious formula Q1 X Q2 X 5.5 = the number of acres required to provide your food. Other factors including shelter and mobility are cranked through equally obscure formula and in the end one’s total “foot print” on the earth is established. Though no questions could get the professor to justify the math; she boldly claimed that the average American exploits 24 acres in living while there are only 5 acres of land per person in the world. Her conclusion: the rest of the world cannot develop the standard of living that Americans enjoy. Her implication: Americans use more than their fair share - therefore it is OK to hate them. The Sierra Club’s quiz culminates with this ominious perdiction: “Population growth will reduce resources available to each person in the future.” -- Oh yah, there was a special “TAKE ACTION note” “ . . . go to the Sierra Club’s Web site at www.sierraclub.org/footprint . . . A second section invites you to "become a member of the Sierra Club’s activist network. It’s one good way for busy people to work for changes that will reduce everyone’s footprint. – K. T.” The Professor went on to list a host of ecological disasters: deforestation, shortage of fresh water, global climate change, depletion of the ocean fisheries, the continued production of DDT. She said that it was impossible for the people of the Africa to ever live at the standard of living that “we here in the US enjoy.” I asked her how her predictions of gloom and doom differed from those of Malthus from the 19th century. She replied that Malthus may well have been right – that the earth will someday reach its carrying capacity. I pointed out the technology had trumped Malthus, She said she preferred the word postponed. I asked here if she was aware of the aqua farming that was producing the endless supply of seafood Americans now consume at the Sizzler’s all you can eat buffet. She said that there are reports that indicate there are higher levels of Mercury in Farm Razed fish. I replied if such was the case – surely that could be fixed. She said she didn’t want to live in a world were there were no wild salmon. I said if it came down to African people having a decent standard of living or maintaining populations of wild salmon; I was for the Africans. She said it didn’t have to come to that. I said, that I knew that and that people say these things just for political purposes. Realizing that the discussion had led her in the opposite direction from where she had intended the class to go, she ended her lecture. As you consider my “arrogant” rant against my professor please also consider these two articles available last week.


The Readers Digest (Not the most prestigious scientific journal but considered quite reliable) carried an article by Gregg Easterbrook (A visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The Progress Paradox) He begins, “So here’s the good news: our air is cleaner, our lakes are purer, our forests are healthier, endangered species are recovering, toxic emissions are down, and acid rain has diminished dramatically.” (pg81) Easterbrook goes on to support these claims specifically. Among the arguments for good news no the environment is some pretty convincing impractical evidence. “Improved Air Quality – Los Angeles went from 150 days per year in violation of smog standards in 1990 to just 27 in 2004” (pg82); “Better Water Quality – just a generation ago, factories and municipal plants actually discharged untreated wastewater directly into rivers; today . . . almost all wastewater in the United States is treated before discharge.. . The Chicago River went from smelly and dirty to sparkling , and is now the setting for dinner cruises.” (pg 85); “Animals are Back – Only one animal species is know to have gone extinct in the United States in the last 15 years, the dusky seaside sparrow. During the same period, numerous other species once described as certain to become extinct – including the Arctic peregrine falcon, the brown pelican, the gray whale, and the bald eagle. . . have recovered sufficiently enough that they are no longer classified as imperiled.” (pg 85) “Forests Are Growing - . . . early in the 19th century, the state of Connecticut was 25 percent forest; today, Connecticut is fully 59 percent forested, though its population has increased twelve fold, from 275,000 to 3.46 million” (pgs 85 – 86). Least anyone claim that these gains are not to be credited to Reagan and the Bush as well as Carter and Clinton; “ Steady environmental improvements have taken place across th4e board, regardless of which party is in the White house or controlling Congress. During the last four years air pollution has continued to decline improvements in technology have reduced emissions, the amount of protected lands is on the uptick . . .”(pg 86) Easterbrook goes on to paint a most hopeful and positive picture of the environment under the “1st world” control of the United States. It seems clear that giving Africans the same standard of living as we enjoy here in the US would probably greatly improve the world’s environment.
The Readers Digest is not alone in recognizing the success of technology and nature. Surprisingly, Nicholas D. Kristof, took a partial break from Bush Bashing in the New York Times to dedicate his March 12th column to debunking the “natural disaster on its way myth”. The following quotes are from “I Have a Nightmare”
1. Kristof begins by quoting Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus:’s web article “The Death of Environmentalism”. “. . . modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, out dated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.”
2. “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that environmental groups are too often alarmist. They have an awful track record, so they’ve lost credibility with the public.”
3. “In the 1970’s, the environmental movement was convinced that the Alaska oil pipeline would devastate the Central Arctic caribou heard. Since then, it has quintupled.
4. “When I first began to worry about climate change, global cooling and nuclear winter seemed the main risks. As Newsweek said in 1975: “Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend . . . but they are all most unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”
5. “Environmentalists were right about DDT’s threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.”
Unfortunately Kristof’s break from bashing the President couldn’t be sustained for a single page editorial. He claims in paragraph three of his piece that “Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may be approved soon, [It is now in the budget] and there’s been no progress whatsoever in the U.S. on what may be the single most important issue to Earth in the long run: climate change.” He then ends his editorial with this self-contradictory claim. “ . . . irreversible changes are precisely what are at stake with the Bush administration’s plans to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, to allow roads in virgin wilderness, and to do essentially nothing on global warming. “

Kristof can’t see that his fears about ANWR and global warming are just as “alarmist” and incredible as the promised devastation that was to have followed the Alaska pipeline or the Ice Age that was bearing down on us in the 70”s. Even as Kristof attempts to present objective truth his hate for Bush pulls him back into Lahlah land to make the same silly claims with which enviro-fanatics are embarrassed themselves out of existence. Kristof probably doesn’t expect his readers to finish his article or to see it in context of “The Death of Environmentalism”.

Oil exploration on ANWR will do almost no environmental damage. If the precedent of Connecticut and the Alaska Pipeline are accepted, it will no doubt improve the Alaskan environment. The resulting fuel supply might well power the wealth necessary to bring a higher and safer standard of living to millions in the US and around the world. But environmentalism has been co-opted by anti-American politics. The purpose of its propaganda is to fuel the hatred of America. By justifying the anger of the people of other nations against America, environmental alarmists join many others in their drive to destroy America and the freedom America seeks to spread throughout the world. Wheather these people are motivated by money, like the Sierra Club, or politics, like the New York Times; rather than channeling the world energy resources into solving the challenges of living on earth and improving the lives of all peoples, such fanatics stir up fear and hate that topples reason.

NPR Stupid

Listening to NPR has long been an adrenalin rush for me. I’m not much for biker bars – but listening to our tax funded propaganda machine gives me my daily dose of suffering. This morning I decide to keep track of the News and Feature stories presented to see if my opinion of the daily does of disaster was real or imagined. Here’s a total report of every topic discussed. Feel free to draw you own conclusions – I have already tipped my hand.

7:00 AM - TOP OF THE HOUR news presented the following reports:
1. Two Baghdad bombings kill 10 Iraqi soldiers.
2. Gunmen kill one of Saddam’s judges and the judge’s lawyer son.
3. Hong Kong Head being forced to resign after Beijing loses faith in him.
4. Debate in Congress – Democrats push bankruptcy exemption for combat vets.
5. Ten Commandments to be debated before Supreme Court today.
6. Death Penalty of juveniles ruled unconstitutional.
7. Bush assignation plotter held without bond.
8. Rejection of “Gay Bashing” law in Kansas.
9. Home mortgage applications down although sales are up. Price of homes up 11.2% for the last year.

KUED comes on for their “local” report;
1. Three Legislative bills discussed
a. Call for money for nursing home for vets.
b. More freedom for midwives stalled!
c. Different colored drivers-privilege card being forced on Undocumented Aliens
2. Springdale town manager pleads guilty.
3. Utah home prices go up! Utah now 37th in nation – well below national average but headed up.

FETURE STORIES:
1. Supreme Court on the Ten Commandments – Most displays put up in the last 50 years were publicity stunts for the Ten Commandments Movie.
2. (Utah Report) 5A Basketball state scores – Jazz to play.
3. Howard Dean – Like a Rock Star in Mississippi reenergizes the party from the ground up.
4. Dateline Vermont: - statewide town meetings vote to oppose the use of Vermont National Guard Troops in Iraq war.

Bottom of the Hour news:
1. Killing of Iraqi Judge
2. Killing of Iraqi soliders
3. Ten Commandments debated at Supreme Court.
4. Bill before congress will make it harder to erase debut through bankruptcy – Dems want more exclusions.

Utah at the Bottom of the Hour
1. Drivers permit for aliens is called raciest.
2. Attack on No Child Left Behind blocked
3. Sales Tax (State portion) earmarked for road repair – taking money away from education and other programs.
4. Privacy destroyed by driving privilege card – the opponents of the bill hold up picture of dead Marine to show that undocumented aliens serve their country and then are humiliated by raciest color coded cards. Undocumented labor [exploited] for the advantage of Utah’s economy.

Next FETURE STORIES:

1. Home land security putting ankle bracelets on illegal aliens rather than putting them in prisons while awaiting their court dates. Reporter claimed that “runaway aliens” are the government’s fault.
2. Bernard Evans World Com. trial.
3. World of Work – “What is Tom Daschle up to now that he is out of office?” Sounds fun!! Boy we miss him! Options: Think Tanks? Law Firms? Investment Institutions? US Senate?

TOP OF THE HOUR NEWS – repeats 7:00 AM stories.

NEXT FEATURE STORIES:
1. Car Levin (Democrat Senator who voted against the war) is brought on to assess the successes in the war on terror of the last few months. His assessment – there have been no real success yet – everything could still fall apart – give us ten years to know for sure.
2. Egypt’s President has released opposition leaders and called for multi party arrangement – This is discussed by an Egyptian Enemy of Mubarak who is asked if it can be attributed to Bush – when he says yes, his interviewer points out that the most powerful opposition groups are terrorist organizations. He is asked if associating democracy with Bush will damage its chances in the Middle East.
3. Full story on court striking down juvenile death penalty and predictions that “life without parole” will also be considered cruel and unusual punishment. NPR gave support to the idea that other nations could determine US law.
4. Dead Cubin author memorialized by a movie maker – This was a Cubin living in excel and trying to keep freedom alive for his people.

BOTTOM OF THE HOUR NEWS:
1. Giant Lobster that no one could eat – it just wouldn’t be right!.
2. Killings in Baghdad
3. Bombings in Baghdad
4. Madrid bombers linked to New York Subway
5. US concerns about Iranian Nuclear program
6. Ten Commandments debated in Supreme Court

BOTTOM OF THE HOUR FROM KUER:
1. Colored licenses for illegal aliens
2. Utah angry over No Child Left Behind – bill HB135 blocked for now. Utah’s “Red State” status makes White House nervous.
3. State budget limitations – highway investment fund. HB 18
4. Driving Privilege card once more mentioning “extorting” labor and racial profiling.

LAST FIFTEEN MINUETS – Human Interest Stories:
1. Matsui’s wife – she is running as a democrat for her dead husband’s empty congressional seat. The story turns into a political commercial for Ms. Matsui
2. Basketball story by Frank DeForge which talks about the “White Man’s Disease” that makes European Basketball players better that American Whites and European style of BB superior to American – example – our loss in the last Olympics.
3. A discussion of capitalist patronage of 18th century music.

9:00 AM - At last the two hours were up. The only story that could be construed as “conservative” was the one about the Dead Cuban author. But how conservative can a Cuban be?. Boy could we use a good biker bar!

Oil and Water - and the Fall of Troy

As Clytemnestra saw the beacon blaze forth beyond Argos, she knew that Troy was destroyed. In her mind she heard the sounds of the fall of Troy; the joy of the Greeks, safe, and homeward bound after ten years campaigning; and the Trojan women wailing for their husbands, lovers, and sons – all dead – their city in flames; their future, slavery. A cacophony of joy and pain which, like oil and water, would not mix.

Back in 1988 “my” High School had a winning football team. I’m not sure that was the last time – but it seems like it was. Be that as it may; that year’s homecoming game was against Bonneville High – the top rated team in the state. Both banks of bleachers were packed – the excitement mounted as the clock ran down with a tie score on the boards. In the overtime that followed, our team got the ball halfway down the field, only seconds on the clock. Our handsome kicker came out onto the field, barefoot, his long blond hair bushing out of his helmet. Amid defining screams the blares of trumpets and the roar of drums and cymbals he kicked the ball fifty yards down the field and through the uprights as the overtime gun cracked. That beautiful fall evening under the lights there was a soft breeze blowing and the grass was so green it hurt your eyes. We cheered and cheered and cheered, the band played, the team left the field but the cheerleaders stayed to dance. The band played on. For fifteen minutes not one Lancer left; the joy went on and on. At last the crowd broke and laughing and hugging we started for the field. It was then I looked across to the Bonneville side. There was no one there! The Bonneville fans had left the field – the emptiness of the stands spoke of their dismay more clearly than tears and lamentation

Today voices cry out in similar discord; winners and losers bellowing forth in sounds that will not mix. Today, twenty five thousand Lebanese stood in the streets of Beirut calling for freedom, “the fire that burns in dark places”, kindled by our heroes sacrifice and by the courage of a President who does what he says. Meanwhile on the floor of the US Senate, Robert Byrd rants about Hitler, condemning the rule of law. In the Holy Land, Israelis and Palestinians standing together against terror – hopeful at last, that murderers can be faced down and sovereignty returned to the hands of the people. Their hope kindled in a world where, at last, power stands for justice. At the same time, the ACLU sues Donald Rumsfeld for torturing terrorists; charges which they cannot support – their only purpose, to voice their discontent with freedom's victory.

Let’s cheer for just a few minutes. Let’s cheer the field goals of freedom kicked as the clock ran down. The landslide victory of George W. Bush in November 2004, the ouster of Putin’s puppet in the Ukraine, the 8,000,000 votes cast “under fire” in Iraq, the Death of the terror monster Yasser Arafat, the election’s held in Gaza and the West Bank, the Courage of the Lebanese facing down Syria, the capture of Saddam’s little brother ( his name not worth remembering), the rebounding American economy, the return of the space shuttle, the flu epidemic that wasn’t, George W’s triumphant tour of Europe, Condoleeza Rice, the death penalty for children declared unconstitutional, Osama and Al Zarkawi on the run, the end of the drought in the west, global warming cooling, 200,000 Iraqi troops in training, North Korea returning to six party talks, Iran and France at each other’s throat. All right now, let’s head out onto the field. Hey,look at the other bleachers; they're empty. No, no wait, there’s Robert Byrd flipping us off from the fifty yard line. Isn’t he cute!

Native Son

Some years ago I found myself in scout uniform “self pumping” gas at the local short stop. Another fellow pulled into the stall next over and started filling his tank.

“Where yah headed?” he asked.

“I’m on my way to speak at an Eagle Scout Court of Honor.”

“Oh yah, me too." He beamed. “Our dance team is putting on the open flag ceremony. We’re Native Americans.”

“Oh yah, me too.” I replied with equal enthusiasm.

“Really?” he queried.

“Yah, I was born in Ogden, Utah.”

That’s not the end of the story. During the lead up to the Winter Olympics of 2002; (Note – it delights me that every two years all the Christians, Jews, and Muslims of the world come together to “worship Zeus”!) I was in the “main” office. Mr. L__, a handsome young teacher newly acquired by the school, was making small talk with one of the secretaries. They were discussing Mr. L__’s participation in the up coming Indian Dance Ceremonies at the Olympic opening show. My Boy Scouts “Indian Dance” all summer long; in fact I consider myself quite an aficionado on Indian Dancing. I have had in my employ; at different times of course; the “World’s Only Living Fire Hoop Dancer” (David Maughan) and the first Indian hoop dancer ever to produce a hoop sphere while hoop dancing (Paul Harris). Any why, I asked Mr. L__ how he had learned to “Indian Dance”.

“I am a Native American!” he proudly intoned.

I chimed in, [you guessed it] “Oh yah, me too, - a pause for effect – I was borne in Ogden, Utah!”

I believe the Olympic ceremony was called the First Utahans or First Americans – something like that. There were representatives of the five Indian Nations found in Utah when the Mormon Pioneers and the Mountain Men first put in their appearance; Utes, Piutes, Shoshones, Hopis, and Navajos. [Please correct me if I got the tribes wrong.] What interested me was the “first peoples” that were missing. There were no Anasazi dancers and no one represented the Fremont people. Why weren’t these “native” people represented? Because they were all “rubbed out” by the Ute. Piute, Shoshone, Hopi, and Navajo invaders who over ran Utah millenniums ago. Yes, these five great Indian Nations perpetrated Genocide!!!! They completely annihilated the “First Utahans”.

This brings me to the rantings of Ward Churchill, the non-Indian, non-professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado.

Last Sunday, I spent over an hour watching CSPAN’s broadcast of Churchill’s speech, pep-rally, and “question” period. Churchill has grabbed fame by writing that the 9/11 attack on America was just punishment for evils “America” has perpetrated in the past. He sighted the steeling of the “land” from its rightful owners. His implication was that “We the People” of the United States are living on stolen land; Indian land from which we should be justly swept into the sea, or to use Churchill’s words the “dust bin of history.” His shouted, angry gibberish was regularly punctuated by half hearted applause and a few boisterous cheers from a crowd of upwards of a hundred people. In front of his podium stood a line of angry looking, dark haired, young men dressed in black and looking ever so much like a line of fascist bully boys. Behind Churchill stood two other impressive motorcycle gang types; no doubt standing by to defend the “professor” should anyone fling the truth in his direction.

His speech was one of the most offensive misrepresentation of history I have ever witnessed. A lie that was applauded by the trained monkeys assembled to “show support” for their master.

I wonder if the “professor” has studied enough history to know that from time immemorial invading waves of people have pulsed over the globe. Does he know about the land bridge that brought the ancestor of the Aztecs flooding down North America on their way to subjugate the peoples who conquered Mexico the time before? The Aztecs harvested the young men of their subject peoples for bloody sacrifice to their Eurasian goddesses? One begins to wonder if Churchill’s image of pre-Columbian America was generated by a Hams Beer Commercial; sweet and loving communal peoples living in harmony with each other and nature. The reality of America before the arrival of Europeans is much like the reality of the rest of the world in any time. Peoples dividing themselves into arbitrary groups – if not by color, then by language, or ancestry, or favorite pottery design; and systematically murdering each other over religion, fear, prejudice and greed. That the Dakota eventually found themselves fighting Irishmen or Africans rather than Shoshones or Crows made little difference to those who killed or died. Cortez, now so vilified in the revisionist history of American development, was once seen as a liberator to the peoples of Mexico who had suffered for centuries under the murderous over lordship of Montezuma and his predecessors.

In Europe, migrating Celts consumed the land and lives of people so forgotten that they are simply called Pre-Celtic. The Celts in turn were over run by Achaeans, Ionians, Dorinas, Latins and Romans, before being driven into the sea by Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans. I wonder if Churchill has ever heard or the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns or the Franks? In Japan, the invading Mongolian people pushed the indigenous Ainu population onto reservations were they still live. The Arians swept across India and the Zulu across South Africa. No one living today is any more responsible for their conquest or migrations than the nearest pile of rocks. Churchill’s whole point is moot; we inherit nothing from our ancestors but our humanity.

It is obvious that Churchill has not concept of these ideas. Having cheated his way into a job at the university by claiming to be an Indian he probably finds it quite simple to continue to cheat his students out of the truth. It is ironic that Ward Churchill’s lies have probably cost “genuine American Indians” the chance to teach Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado. I wonder how the three Indian scholars who had their chance at a job stolen by this fake Indian feel about the justice of Ward Churchill’s sending them “back to the reservation”?

The fact is that Churchill’s phony claims only serve to emphasize the truth; that no one is any more closely related to any of the long dead legions of the past than any one else. Many of my friends and family cherish the notion that they are some how mystically descended from Hebrews. It is a good thing that Jesus has explained that God is capable of turning stones into sons of Abraham.

But Churchill takes his lie past the foolish to the dangerous. Claiming some mystical right of decent, “Chief” Ward calls down the avenging might of Islamic terrorists on the heads of Americans. Innocents who had no more choice in their linage than he did. Who have killed no more Indians than they have Pre-Celts. How odd for someone purporting to be a liberal to visit the sins of the fathers on the heads of the children way past the third and forth generation.

Churchill went on to further fabricate a position by claiming that the murder of Americans, and now Iraqis as they must fight for freedom against terrorists, is just retribution for the 500,000 Iraqi children starved to death by the US sanctions imposed on Saddam’s regime. The fact is that there is not evidence that any Iraqi children starved to death during the long years of sanctions. More importantly it has become obvious the money for the food and medicine intended for the people of Iraq provided by the Oil for Food program was stolen by Saddam, his buddies in the UN, and some very connected people in France, Germany, and Russia. [Interesting that these are the same nations who’s miss-leadership called for continuing the “diplomatic” solutions to Saddam’s mass murders, support of terrorism, and development of terror weapons.]

My students and I study the Orestes cycle. The story of the vengeance of the Furies on the house of Atreus. The senate of Argos chants “Now the blood that Atreus shed falls on Agamemnon’s head”. It is Athena the Goddess of Wisdom, Justice, and Righteous War, who imposed the shield of the Law between the Furies and the people. As long as the people act in accordance with truth, the Furies will be contained. Now Ward Churchill wants to dredge up clan hatred, blood grudge, and the furies to reek vengeance on the children of people long dead. Terrorist are the prefect tools for this diabolic scheme. They drip the blood of the "eye for and eye, life for life" vengeance of the uncivilized past. Seeking to stir up hate against innocent people by conjuring injustices done to long dead ancestors or their comrades in murder, Churchill and his disciples perpetuate the blood feud. What a convenient weapon terror is once reason goes away.

At the end of his rant Churchill took questions. Most were testimonials to the master’s greatness, but one young man challenged Ward. He said that although he disagreed with Churchill, he felt that Churchill had a right to say what he ever he wanted. He challenged, "why do you protest the celebration by “my people”, the celebration of Columbus Day." "Why," the young Italian American asked, "don’t my 4th amendment rights mean anything to you?" Churchill then launched on a convoluted ramble explaining that the 9th amendment, which reserves all rights not enumerated in the constitution to the people, protected his human rights. To Churchill, showing honor to “the beginner of the Genocide of his people” violated his human rights. This is utterly ludicrous, first, there is no implied right in the Constitution to defend anyone from being insulted, and secondly, Churchill’s rantings about the “little Ikemans” of the Twin Towers might well offend the human feelings of their children, parents, friends, and lovers. The young man tried a follow up question; no doubt wishing to point out Churchill’s miss interpolation of the 9th amendment, but was shouted down by the mob and the “professor”. Obviously in Churchill’s world of fantasy scholarship, and fantasy Indians, one only gets one question at the foot of the fantasy god Churchill!

Churchill would do well to study a little Cicero along with the history his missed. He might come to understand that “Men and Gods are all one commonwealth” and stop trying to claw his way to position and power by inciting hate and division among Americans and other peoples of the world. Maybe he ought to listen to Socrates and Gandhi – who claimed citizenship in no city or county but proudly claimed to be native sons of the world!.

The Day of the Jackal and the Last Ice Age

All week long as I’ve slogged through the snow, froze as I scrape the ice off my windshield, and listened to the furnace rumble on again and again; I’ve wondered, “where is this global warming they’ve been promising?”

There have been a few warm winters, the snows in Siberia are a bit dryer than in the 80’s, and we are told there is an earth devistating warming trend on its way. Not only earth devastating, but man caused – specifically SUV sales and George W. Bush caused. I’m quite sure that if the Enviro-Nazis would have been around at the end of the last ice age their complaints against troglodyte campfires would have preempted human evolution.

“In August was the Jackal born;
The Rains fell in September;
Now such a fearful flood as this.’
Says he, ‘I can’t remember!’”

These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books are given as a rebuke to a young jackal whose pretended wisdom amuses those wiser beasts who have “been around” a few more seasons. Environmental extremists, desperate for a cause capable of frightening the masses into accepting their demands, have latched onto a few warm winters as a club to bludgeon their agenda down the global craw. Fortunately there are a few of us who have been around. I say fortunately, because these self-serving fund raisers are capable of preempting our way of life. Perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of this falsehood is the environmental hammer lock on American Oil production. A situation made possible by the vilification of fossil fuel production as well as consumption. American is not allowed to utilize its oil and coal resources, and condemned for exploiting the foreign energy sources available to us. These agitators damage us all by hanging a theory of planetary disaster on a few decades of weather fluctuations and pasting the blame for this weather on American. Their harm is real and recognizable.

1. They damages our economy by giving advantage to foreign competitors and waists enormous time and recourses in frivolous law suits which clog our over burdened courts and put off necessary projects. (Think Legacy Highway!)

2. Anti - administration pundits exacerbate anti-American attitudes across the world. Giving America’s enemies propaganda weapons to use against this country. They entangle the Iraq war in false claims of oil greed; which emboldens terrorists.

3. They lock up American resources, increasing our dependency on “Arab Oil” and putting our nation at a strategic as well as economic disadvantage in a very competitive world.

4. They increase the suffering of the poor by:

a) Preempting economic growth and the jobs cheaper energy could stimulate into existence,

b) Increasing food production and transportation costs which, to use the sensational rhetoric of the left, forces the poor to choose between spending their money on food, medicine, or fuel. I wonder how many grandmas have frozen this “globally warmed winter” because there was no cheep American fuel to warm them.

5. They send up production prices, transportation prices, the cost of heating or cooling working places, school, and stores; increasing consumer prices as personal resources are wasted.

6. They force up airline cost and harm this valuable part of our economy and all its adjunct industries.

7. They increase the cost of auto production. These artificially forced up expenses are passed on to consumers who barley can afford the “guilty pleasure” of driving their own cars.

8. They encourage global methane production, which shoots up as the population of pooping Caribou skyrockets. (Alright – I admit I am kidding here, though I actually had a University Professor tell a class I was attending that beef cattle were causing global warming by relieving themselves. When I asked him why the same wasn’t true of the billions of buffalo that once roamed the Pre Columbian plains – he said I was being “too negative”.)

I remember the bitter winters of the 80’s when the environmentalists were predicting the beginning of an Ice Age. When the mountains of snow flooded over dams and sent the waters of the Great Salt Lake across Weber, Davis, and Salt Lake Counties. Then in 1988 a drought brought a summer of fire to Yellowstone. I can also remember the heat and the drought of the decade before that.

1977 was the last of several years of drought. I spent that summer in the Yellowstone backcountry at Camp Loll BSA. Some weekends I took the kids who worked for me on drives past Grassy and Jackson Lake. As the water in these man made reservoirs disappeared, my staff became concerned. They came to me one Saturday afternoon, after the scouts had left. They demanded they be allowed to spend the next two days building a dam across the end of Lake of the Woods – the natural lake on which our camp sits.

“Why?” I asked.

“To keep the Lake for running out.”

“How deep is Lake of the Woods were it runs into Cascade Creek?”

“About this deep,” one of the staffers said, holding his fingers about three inches apart.

“When the lake goes down three inches won’t it stop running out on its own?”

“Oh ya,” they said, and walked away without a word - no thanks for the wisdom that freed up their weekend.

The world needs to seek a little truth too. Phony science used to prop up attacks on America must be debunked. We must not listen to the yapping of the Jackals. We need to find some wiser heads.

G. I. Cody and Hoping for Failure

The anti - Iraqi, terrorist murders are taking lessons from Mike Moore, and the Democrat media (CBS). Moore’s dictum is, "When the facts don’t fit your point of view manufacture them!" The terrorists, unable to capture an American solider to torture and murder, have stuck up a plastic toy (G.I. Cody) threatened it with a toy gun, a draped a toy flag behind it. A toy flag covered with the toy slogans of a toy religion.

When the hoax was revealed, the disappointment of the mainstream media was palpable. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be funny. Someday the "enemies of democracy" will capture and torture to death an American solider. Then the Dan Rather, Ted Kennedy crowd will blame President Bush; not the terrorists for the atrocity.

To further examine the "Mike Moore" model of influencing the world, let’s look at the goals of two groups involved in "toy tinkering":

Group one - The murderers trying to destroy the free nation of Iraq - Their goal is to advance their religious fanaticism (oppression of women, repression of human rights, end of religious freedom, destruction of reason, and liberal education) and to secure selfish power for themselves.

Group two - The Democrats trying in to make President Bush fail - Their goal is to advance their ideological fanaticism (abortion protection, environmental radicalism, socialism, forced egalitarianism, and atheism) and selfish power for themselves.

G. I. Cody is only one of the many puppet pantomimes acted out in the media. The toy side show of Democrat’s Reed and Palosi’s prebuttal to the President’s State of the Union is a Punch and Judy howler put up to frighten America away from Social Security reform. Up coming "let’s pretends" will include toy arguments against Attorney General Gonzalez and trinket shows to attack Supreme Court nominees.

A week ago the "toy" attacks were against the "then upcoming" elections and were put out, Mike Moore style, by the democrats and the terrorists. [I clearly state the murder of 40+ innocent people in Iraq, was no game. But these tragedies do not compare to the "streets running with blood" we were told to expect.] The truth of eight million Iraqis voting said to the toy makers, "you can’t fool us." Bush’s clear majority in the 2004 election said the same thing to the media puppet pundits. Now the "toy" attacks on America’s Iraq policy concentrates on power and water shortages, and the percentage of this or that group in the Constitutional Convention. Call such arguments "straw men" or lies, but they are "toy men" for sure.

One of the most insidious "toy men" of the Democrats is to set up a bar and then require President Bush to reach it or "fail." We are told if the number of soldiers killed doesn’t go down, Bush will be a failure. Another toy is to demand President Bush set a deadline for the withdrawal of troops. What a stupid demand. Where would the French be if Roosevelt would have said the US would pull our troops out of Europe by November 1944 whether Hitler was beaten or not.

Since neither the Terrorists nor the Democrats can get America to pull its troops out of Iraq, they must pull out the toys. Why? Those out of power in Bagdad and Washington can only get power if Bush fails. If there are no real failures; count on the enemies of freedom, truth, and the President; inspired by Mike Moore’s manufactured success; to pull out some toy ones.

Let's Remember Where Teddy Put His Faith

Today, Ted Kennedy’s faith crumbled under the weight of (not his belly but) the truth! As one listens to the reports of the overwhelming success of democracy in Iraq, the echo of Ted Kennedy’s bitter words of last week should be noted before they fade in the biased memory of the left leaning media. Kennedy put his faith in the failure of the Iraqi elections. He claimed the mission of American troops had failed, and that they (our warrior heros) had become "part of the problem" in Iraq. A problem he did not define.

Ted Kennedy is hoping for another Vietnam - and this time he hopes that when American fails, its enemies will succeed. He is hoping for the failure of freedom so he can vindicate his politically driven refusal to support freedom in the past.

In the 1970's Ted Kennedy put his faith in Communism. He lead the charge to desert the people of South Vietnam. Confident that once American troops left that war torn country the "social wonder of Marxism" would build a super world of prosperity and peace. As President Nixon observed in No More Vietnams, "Communism brought peace to Vietnam - the peace of the grave." The "bright Communist future" of Kennedy's faith crumbled under the weight of mass murder, slavery, and poverty. When Communism collapsed, Kennedy's faith was crushed.

Now Ted Kennedy has put his faith (and the hope for the future of the Democrat Party) in the failure of freedom in Iraq. He put his faith in terrorists who have declared war on Democracy; terrorists who use murder and intimidation to gain power and control over the minds and souls of men and women; fellow humans who, although they may be from Iraq not Boston, have the universal and unalienably rights offered by God to all. Teddy put his faith in the failure of Iraq’s electoral process. If the elections had failed he would have said, "I told you so."; his faith vindictated. His faith in the terrorists is a dream of justifying his failed faith in the communist conquers of South Vietnam. Where freedom to fail it would salve his guilty conscience for having deserted freedom in the past. Thus Ted Kennedy puts his faith in any force that might show freedom unworthy of faith.

He was wrong before - he is wrong now. The truth about Vietnam did not shut him up; we have little hope that he will admit the triumph of freedom now. But today’s truth has once again crushed Ted Kennedy’s faith in freedom’s foes.

Gay Marriage Settled

How to deal with the "question" of Gay Marriage:

I am looking forward to the first Sunday in February. In a church meeting, surrounded by priests and high priests and probably a bishop, my grandson will be given a name and a blessing Were he a Catholic or an Anglican he would be christened. Where he a Jew he might even have been circumcised as part of a religious ceremony. When I was in Japan I saw some wonderful Shinto naming ceremonies complete with beautiful silk kimonos for mother and child. It was a beautiful and meaningful ceremony to all who honor the teaching of that ancient religion, but like all of the ceremonies referenced above, it had absolutely no force of civil law. Almost two months ago my grandson was already given a name. It was chosen by his parents and will be printed out on his birth certificate. Along with the name he got his social security number and all the rights and privileges of American citizenship. Why the two ceremonies and the redundant certificates?

I was baptized into my church years ago. There was not official government document, but I didn’t feel badly about that. My baptism was sacred sacrament of my religion; the state had no business there. My Catholic friend did not consider me baptized and he told me I would end up in Hell, but I didn’t care. I didn’t believe him or in his particular version of baptism. I know many people who were never baptized and frankly they don’t care that many "religious" people think they are somehow incomplete with out the process. And the government of my country takes no note of either condition at all.

I see in this separation of church and state the perfect solution to the "question" of gay marriages now dividing America. Get the state out of the marriage business. Let the state sanction civil union contracts only. Such unions would follow all the same legal forms and standards as what is now called "marriage" but would require only government documentation or certification or whatever now puts into place the legal obligations of man, wife, and parent.

Now turn marriage ceremonies over to religions institutions or party caterers or wood elves. I suppose that since the Pope does not recognize the priesthood of the bishop presiding at the "blessing" of my grand baby, he is not officially named in the view of the Catholic Church. I don’t care, my grandson wasn’t named as a Jew or a Shinto either. I don’t think that will ever bother him But he has a name on the records of the Government of the United States. And civil unions could serve the same purpose in uniting people under law who want to share their lives together. If ones church doesn’t want to marry gay people they will never be required to. And all who believe that gay marriage is a sin will be able to know in their hearts that gay people cannot be married in the church the people who don’t believe in gay marriage belong to. The same thing will then apply to gay people who want to get married. They can find plenty of churches or party caterers or wood elves to preform the ceremony for them. If the gay couple is motivated by the protection of their union and not by the desire to "in your face" people who they don’t agree with; they should be satisfied. Everyone will be happy, everyone will have the privileges and responsibilities now required of men and wives under the obligations of the government and everyone will be satisfied that their sacred ceremony of marriage has not been violated.

Is America a Chirstian Nation?

Sometimes I lead a Sunday discussion for all the "old men" in my neighborhood. (High Priest Group) Believe me, age wise, this bunch is way past the village elders. I turned down my AARP membership some years ago but I am usually the youngest in the crew of white and balding heads. This past Sunday the lecture was titled: Jesus Christ: "the Way, the Truth, and the Life". As I read the "lesson" material the question: Is America a Christian Nation?" came to mind.

At the first opportunity I asked the class if American was a Christian Nation.
I received the Universal mummer of yes and the wagging of many snow covered brows.

"Why?" (the trap question)

"Because we are founded on Judeo-Christian teachings, on the Ten Commandments!"

"Oh really? Tell me which of the Ten Commandments American laws enshrine?"

Nervous silence

"What laws support the "No other Gods command?"

Nervous laughter.

"How about, "No graven images"?

This was getting serious. I went on.

"How about "No taking the name of the Lord in Vain"? In which state is that law enforced?’

"Are we required by law to "Keep the Sabbath (Saturday) Day holey"? I don’t think so.

"Honoring father and mother? This commandment might have a promise, but there is no statute to back it up."

"Thou shalt not steal? Well finally, and there are laws against murder too, but I think Hammurabi beat Moses to the punch on those. I"ll bet these "natural" laws were in force in the caves of the Neanderthal."

"As for the rest - "False Witness", only if your in court, under oath, and not a popular Democrat President."

That one got a few laughs!

"And as far as Coveting goes - I dare say it’s part of our Puritan Ethic."

Well, by this time the Ten Commandment line was about spun out so one eager participant explained, with great patience to the delinquent discussion leader (me), " that America was a Christian Nation because the majority of the people in it accepted Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of the World."

I replied that, "Satin and all his devils know that Jesus is the Christ. Did that make Hell a Christian Country?"

By this point they were thinking, and this is were the real advantage of discussion things with a group with real wisdom pays off.

Some old fellow spoke up,"We are a Christian nation because we follow the example of Christ."

The claim was followed by a flood of supporting evidence. Americans feed the hungry (think the Tsunami victims) Americans shed blood to bring freedom to others (think Iraq) Americans take care of the orphan and the poor (think our government and private assistance programs). It was pointed out that in America private donations to aid South Asia exceeded US government ones. Even government donations are from the taxes Americans pay to care for their fellows. We discussed how a Christian nation would not persecute those who held different beliefs. HOw such a nation would love the turth, and freedom, and justice. Someone mentioned the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate that those who follow Christ can not be bigots. Thus the discussion moved away from the tense first few minuets into a discussion of how we individually and collectively need to live Christlike lives if we are to be a Christian Nation.

At this point I ventured that Christlike did not mean only church going. "I’ll bet the priest and the Levite that walked past the suffering man at the road to Damascus were regular church attenders." All agreed; Christian meant the way we lived our lives, not the things we said or the meetings we attended."

I was reminded of the question that every teacher - perhaps particularly history teachers - get asked so often; "When am I ever going to use this stuff." The stuff we learn by attending church meetings and reading scriptures is useless unless we live by what we learn. That is the whole purpose of studying - to learn what to do. There is no sanctity in the study, only in the application of lessons learned.

And so we ended our discussion with another question. "Are we a Muslim Nation, a Buddhist Nation, a Hindu Nation, a Stoic Nation, a Taoist Nation?"

The answer: "Only by being truly one can we be the others!"

A Speech for Today,a Speech for All Time

Here are my favorite quotes from President Bush's Second Inaugural Address. I think it was wonderful - full of absolute truth. I will not comment now. Tell us what you think.

1. "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat."

2. "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom."

3. "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

4. "American’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

5. "From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth."

6. "Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation."

7. "The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations."

8. "The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it."

9. "We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom which is eternally right."

10. ". . . yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed."

11. "In the long run, there is not justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty."

12. "We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery."

13. "By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world."

14. "Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself - and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character."

15. "That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the Varied faith of our people, America moves forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever."

16. ". . . always remember that even the unwanted have worth."

17. "And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time."

18. "From the view point of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of Freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?"

19. "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul."

20. "When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty."

Promises, Prayers, and "The Dog in the Manger"

There was a time when the soldiers of Rome would gather to swear allegiance to a new emperor; investing in him, by the strength of their swords, the power proffered by the Senate and the people. Next Thursday, 20, January, 2005 the "most powerful man in the world" will swear his obedience and devotion to the Law. George W. Bush will take an oath in the name of God to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. The Inauguration of a President is not a celebration of election victory; not a glamorous gloat. It is a sacred ordinance whereby WE THE PEOPLE are promised the rights endowed upon us by the Creator.

I find it telling that the days leading up to the Inaugural ceremony are filled with court battles over prayer. Mobs of malcontents are amassing to practice their right to make fools of themselves by pouting and ranting against the will of the majority and the Constitution. They claim the "constitutional" right to pout before the world, but they, with shrill protestation and frivolous suits, attempt to muzzle the prayers of their countrymen and debase the celebration of the supremacy of Law. Their lawlessness and lies will pollute the airwaves and foul the highest mass of our nationhood. With thoughtless demonstrations of discontent they will attempt to drown out the rights of others in an obscene misexercise of their own. Theirs is the same chop logic that condemns the burning of a cross as hate speech but justifies the burning of a flag as free speech.

Aesop tells the fable of the "Dog in the Manger." The dog, shirking his duties, finds a comfortable bed and sleeps the day away curled up on the soft hay of the ox’s manger. As darkness falls the weary ox returns from his day long labor at the plow looking forward to his supper. But when the ox approaches his rightful feast, the dog snarls and snaps driving the poor beast away. The snapping dog will neither eat the hay nor allow the hungry ox to do so. Curled up on the cozy nest of their Constitutional rights the snarling dogs of the left neither support the Constitution nor allow others to partake of their rights therein.

A majority of Americans support President Bush. He was elected by a clear majority and chosen according to the dictates of the Constitution. Those who hate President Bush have no real love of the Constitution. They are not interested in justice; only in their own desires. They let the Law labor for them when it serves their need but disdain it when it inconveniences their agenda. Like terrorists everywhere, the sore losers of the 2004 election are snapping and snarling like angry dogs. Having lost their legitimacy, they must usurp attention by violence and intimidation. On the day when all mankind should celebrate the sacred miracle of government of, for, and by the people; their whining and barking will disrupt the peace. These unworthy acts will show the "protesters" for what they are. Their barking and whining will not dim the wonder for those who are wise enough to ignore the dog sounds and listen to the prayers and sacred oaths of a noble, just, and honorable servant of the people.

Grima Lives!

J.R.R. Tolkien said his books were not allegories, rather fantastic histories. One purpose of history is to help us recognize situations, elements, and forces that might occur again. The Good, as it has always been, is locked in conflict with evil. Tolkien said he was inspired to write the Lord of the Rings by the Lords Prayer - specifically the line, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." From this plea he recognizes two basic forces of evil, that within - temptation, the power of the ring to corrupt its bearer, and that without - evil to be delivered from, the dark lord, Sauron.

Many who now oppose the war fail to grasp this important lesson from the "history" of Middle Earth and good news of the New Testament. They see only the evil within and admonish us to live like the hobbits of the Shire, kept safe by simplicity. But the Evil that threatened Middle Earth would have brought destruction to the peaceful as will as the valiant. And those who have read the whole story will know that even after Sauron had dissipated into the void, evil seized the Shire; bringing death, destruction, and slavery.

Now to Grima Wormtongue; Wormtongue is one of the most effective of the servants of Sauron, one of the most effective weapons of the Evil without. Long trusted, he brings decay before death, corrupting while pretending to support. Like his master Saruman, "the big spider who manipulates the little one," Grima weaves webs of deceit that clog and darken the wisdom of those who’s action will be necessary to end evil. Gandalf recognizes the voice of Sauron in that the words of Saruman and Wormtongue, and move to counter disaster. Before Theoden can rise up to play his part in the salvation of Middle Earth, Grima must be relieved and the pollution of his deceptions washed away by the light of truth.

More and more the Media and academia are filled with smooth- tongued councilors that clog, enfeeble, deceive, and pollute. It would be well to catalogue such subtleties. It was only when they were recognized and unmasked that Saruman and Grima could be defeated.

Some poison from the New York Times:

"Washington’s New Year War Cry: Party On!" Frank Rich, January 2, 2005:

"Ordinary people beyond Washington, red and blue Americans alike, are feeling the a disconnect more and more. . . . ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70 percent of Americans believed that any gains in Iraq had come at the cost of "unacceptable" losses in casualties and that 56 percent believed the war wasn’t "worth fighting"

Can’t you hear Grima telling Theoden that war is too difficult and we should stay home and die?

Ibid.

"Such is the disconnect between the country and the war that there is no national outrage when the president awards the Medal of Freedom to the clowns who undermined the troops by bungling intelligence (George Tenet) and Iraqi support (Paul Bremer)."

In this attack on the heros who brought safety to our homeland and freedom to millions, can’t you hear the voice of Grima calling Gandalf - Strom Crow?


"Promoting Torture’s Promoter", Bob Herbert, January 7 2005: (an attack on Alberto Gonzales)

"His [Gonzales] judgments regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners rounded up in Iraq and the so-called war on terror have been both unsound and shameful. Some of the practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome, medieval."

Here, Grima (Herbert) attacks Eomer (Gonzales), vilifying the very hero who loyally stood by our faltering nation in its fight for survival. Herbert goes on to make more unsupported and untruthful claims about things Mr. Gonzales said and the effects his actions had. Herbert gives comfort and ammunition to our enemies and spins a web of glum about the heart of a nation that needs all its strength to survive. Without a single fact to support his subtlety he hisses:

Ibid.

"Americans have tended to view the U. S. as the guardian of the highest ideals of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that’s getting more and more difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of justice have no choice but to look elsewhere."

Even as Tolkien’s Grima sowed the seeds of doubt in the justice of the cause against evil his king and country so desperately needed to fight, Herbert and an army of "real world" Grimas are poisoning America’s spirit of resolve. They fill our minds with self doubt and breed contention within while the evil without grows stronger day by day.

I could go on - every news broadcast; every editorial page is full of the whisperings and deceits of those who, beneficing from the protection of our great country, are in league with those who would destroy it. I will end my list here hoping that others in the Agora can present examples. Perhaps there are those who would defend Grima and explain how our nation would be better off listening to "his" advice.