Curtis Dahlgren
A few words more: part IV (or, "On the matter of judicial appointments")
By Curtis Dahlgren
"There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous." — Napoleon I (1812, after the retreat from Moscow)
"The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately." — Thomas Paine (Age of Reason, 1795)
"SOAP AND EDUCATION ARE NOT AS SUDDEN AS A MASSACRE, BUT THEY ARE MORE DEADLY IN THE LONG RUN." — Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In modern academia, the "sublime" would be the concept of "multiculturalism," but the ridiculous would be today's intellectual mono-culture that is proving more deadly than Dutch elm disease. Every significant cultural truth has its kernel of humor, and vice-versa, but there's a fungus among us in modern Academe.
Mark Twain often had more than his tongue in his cheek, but his observations are "priceless"! The same people who scorn the "inbred rednecks" are blind to their own incestuousness. The very same people who hype "critical thinking" now pay honorariums to campus speakers who say that "there never were any jets that flew into the WTC or the Pentagon." And other sponsored speakers say that Islam did it and "we deserve more of it"!
WHICH IS IT? THEY CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS!
As a perfect example of the sublime/ridiculous, the president of Harvard apologizes for speaking a forbidden "fact," and then commits fifty million dollars to "diversity"! HUH?
Thomas Moore once said:
"But Faith, fanatic Faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last."
Though he died in 1852, that sounds like a reference to a film by MICHAEL Moore, which 21st century academics will hug until their very last breath.
That's not a call for "violence," by the way, lest you choose to make such an inference; this series is simply a literary response to "Harper's Fairy Tale," page 55 of the current Harper's (Feeling the ["hatred"] with the National Religious Broadcasters by Chris Hedges).
He writes, "What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian 'dominion' over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself . . . [they] would require citizens to pay 'tithes' to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for [?] a host of 'moral crimes,' including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft."
YOU GET THE PICTURE: "Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas." "Unnamed figures"?
I guess it's true, but sad, that the editors of Harper's and Newsweek don't read this column. I could have warned them about the consequences of rhetoric, hyperbole, and "falsehoods," as Thomas Moore so gently put it.
Adlai Stevenson once said that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady. The same could be said of news magazines, and the loss of virtue, by Newsweek, cannot be absolved by a "retraction." The thing about death is that it's so fatal, you "journalists"!
"A truth that's told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent." — William Blake (1757-1827)
The MSM (mainstream media) seem hell-bent on peddling both lies and "bad intent"! Harper's and Newsweek lie, while people die — some from Islamic riots and some by AIDS. If by some miracle, this column should come to their attention (hint, hint), here's a sampling of my most relevant lines:
"The world is full of fools, someone once said, and he who would not see it should live alone and smash his mirror."
www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/030909
"Man is a creature who lives, not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords." — Robert Louis Stevenson
www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/040116
"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than [when] cunning men pass for wise." — Bacon
www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/050511
The spectacle of an arborist such as myself "lecturing" the learned media just struck me as "ridiculous," but the company that trained me had a motto: DO IT RIGHT OR NOT AT ALL. There could be a lesson in there somewhere for educators, journalists, and politicians!
The left-handed pundits are driving away their "captive audience" because there is often not even a kernel of truth to their words. Their dearest fantasy was to capture the halls of Academe and then proceed to create an army of pseudo-intellectuals to obey their marching orders and carry their secular 'gospel' to every corner of the kingdom. The theory was that if you repeat a lie often enough, the perception would become reality.
Their idea of "critical thinking" was to simply criticize every "non-progressive" idea as "anti-intellectualism." The flaw in their slaw is that too many people out there in the Heartland still exercise TRUE critical thinking (i.e., see their "new clothes" for what they are: intellectual nudity).
BY THE WAY, another line from my column was "TIMING IS EVERYTHING." The liberals couldn't have chosen a more inopportune time to take a stand for liberal judges — immediately after a Federal judge threw out a pro-marriage law passed by nearly 3/4 of the voters of the state of Nebraska (and let us not forget that the same thing happened in "liberal" California)!
WE ARE APPROACHING YOGI BERRA'S "FORK IN THE ROAD"
THE QUESTION IS, will the United States Congress listen to the "little people"? Will Rogers said, "If you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there." Good advice for both Parties!
"POLITICS ARE NOW NOTHING MORE THAN A MEANS OF RISING IN THE WORLD." — Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Thomas Jefferson said, "Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them [political offices], a rottenness begins in his conduct."
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said, "There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise . . . There be that can pack the cards and yet cannot play well; so there are some that are good in canvasses [elections] and factions, that are otherwise weak men."
This would especially apply to politicians who characterize the extreme as "moderate" and the wise as "extreme." Senators of both stripes are scrambling to avoid a showdown through a so-called "compromise" that would throw out the President's two favorite choices for the Federal appeals courts. Can such an "eagle" fly?
"All colours agree in the dark," said Bacon, but too much light is being thrown on the subject by the alternative media outside the Beltway. Only inside the Beltway is business as usual and surrender perceived as "Progress" and "statesmanship"!
Bacon also said, "It has been well said that the arch-flatterer with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence is a man's self . . . Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time."
If the self-flatterers in Washington can't even get the "history" of the last month straight — or the history of congressional filibusters — we are indeed heading for a shipwreck. The PLAIN TRUTH is that it's going to take an ACT OF CONGRESS to get an up-or-down vote on the President's nominees (something never before denied in the history of this Republic).
WILL THE SENATE HAVE THE COURAGE TO ACT?
"Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds," said the Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773). And I'm including those dates to shame the Senate, if such a thing is even possible. Whether they realize it or not, "Otherwise weak men [and women]" are being put to shame by a handful of words from our past (300 years ago and more, even though our latter-day "statesmen" would rather curry favor from the already-disgraced Mainstream Media than listen to the "little people" in fly-over country).
Even though the Constitution gives the power of appointment to the President, and precedent until now gave "power to the people" through "advice and consent" of Congress, the oligarchy of the Judiciary is being institutionalized before our very eyes by the "mainstreaming" of judges whose first order of business is rewriting the Constitution!
"Set it down to thyself, as well to create good precedents as to follow them . . . A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green." — Francis Bacon
There's a lot of revenge evident in the workings of the minority in Congress — revenge against the estimated 141 million citizens who listen to National Religious Broadcasters instead of the subsidized National Public Radio. Desperate scare tactics notwithstanding, the people are voting with their ears and with the Internet.
The liberals feel the heat, and their fall-back position is coming to be buzzwords such as "common ground" and "moderation." Forced to faced the "God issues," the only god they will acknowledge publicly is that "Deist" God who keeps His hands off (and "therefore, believers should just shut up and let the rest of us run the show"). Who is accusing whom of "obsession with political power"?
The Left will "respect" any religion that keeps its "hands off" in the Deist manner. Claiming to be apostles of enlightenment and modernization, they are especially hateful toward those of us who point out that the Founding Fathers were not Deists.
Benjamin Franklin, the so-called "poster boy" of Deism, wrote the following epitaph for his tombstone:
The body of
Benjamin Franklin, printer
(Like the cover an old book,
Its contents worn out,
And stript of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms!
Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more
In a new
And more beautiful edition,
Corrected and amended
By its Author!
SO MUCH FOR "BEN THE DEIST"!
The great "work" of our Founders' lives that is our Heritage is heading for a shipwreck in many, many ways. When "weak minds" will resort to ANYTHING to protect "government of the few, by the few, and for the few" — and when defenders of God-given Rights refuse to take a stand — we might as well all (as Shakespeare said) "die merrily," because — as Napoleon said — "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous."
ON THE OTHER HAND, should they look to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of their intentions (as our Founding Fathers did), their "work itself" SHALL NOT BE LOST!
Thomas Paine said, "One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again." He was alluding to the possibility of rectifying the "mistakes" human nature would be sure to make somewhere down the road.
This month, May of 2005, finds America at a crossroads, and Paine's words to us would probably be:
"The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country."
I HATE TO HAVE TO POINT OUT THE OBVIOUS, BUT WE STILL DO HAVE A CHOICE!
© Curtis Dahlgren
"There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous." — Napoleon I (1812, after the retreat from Moscow)
"The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately." — Thomas Paine (Age of Reason, 1795)
"SOAP AND EDUCATION ARE NOT AS SUDDEN AS A MASSACRE, BUT THEY ARE MORE DEADLY IN THE LONG RUN." — Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In modern academia, the "sublime" would be the concept of "multiculturalism," but the ridiculous would be today's intellectual mono-culture that is proving more deadly than Dutch elm disease. Every significant cultural truth has its kernel of humor, and vice-versa, but there's a fungus among us in modern Academe.
Mark Twain often had more than his tongue in his cheek, but his observations are "priceless"! The same people who scorn the "inbred rednecks" are blind to their own incestuousness. The very same people who hype "critical thinking" now pay honorariums to campus speakers who say that "there never were any jets that flew into the WTC or the Pentagon." And other sponsored speakers say that Islam did it and "we deserve more of it"!
WHICH IS IT? THEY CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS!
As a perfect example of the sublime/ridiculous, the president of Harvard apologizes for speaking a forbidden "fact," and then commits fifty million dollars to "diversity"! HUH?
Thomas Moore once said:
"But Faith, fanatic Faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last."
Though he died in 1852, that sounds like a reference to a film by MICHAEL Moore, which 21st century academics will hug until their very last breath.
That's not a call for "violence," by the way, lest you choose to make such an inference; this series is simply a literary response to "Harper's Fairy Tale," page 55 of the current Harper's (Feeling the ["hatred"] with the National Religious Broadcasters by Chris Hedges).
He writes, "What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian 'dominion' over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself . . . [they] would require citizens to pay 'tithes' to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for [?] a host of 'moral crimes,' including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft."
YOU GET THE PICTURE: "Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas." "Unnamed figures"?
I guess it's true, but sad, that the editors of Harper's and Newsweek don't read this column. I could have warned them about the consequences of rhetoric, hyperbole, and "falsehoods," as Thomas Moore so gently put it.
Adlai Stevenson once said that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady. The same could be said of news magazines, and the loss of virtue, by Newsweek, cannot be absolved by a "retraction." The thing about death is that it's so fatal, you "journalists"!
"A truth that's told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent." — William Blake (1757-1827)
The MSM (mainstream media) seem hell-bent on peddling both lies and "bad intent"! Harper's and Newsweek lie, while people die — some from Islamic riots and some by AIDS. If by some miracle, this column should come to their attention (hint, hint), here's a sampling of my most relevant lines:
"The world is full of fools, someone once said, and he who would not see it should live alone and smash his mirror."
www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/030909
"Man is a creature who lives, not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords." — Robert Louis Stevenson
www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/040116
"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than [when] cunning men pass for wise." — Bacon
www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/050511
The spectacle of an arborist such as myself "lecturing" the learned media just struck me as "ridiculous," but the company that trained me had a motto: DO IT RIGHT OR NOT AT ALL. There could be a lesson in there somewhere for educators, journalists, and politicians!
The left-handed pundits are driving away their "captive audience" because there is often not even a kernel of truth to their words. Their dearest fantasy was to capture the halls of Academe and then proceed to create an army of pseudo-intellectuals to obey their marching orders and carry their secular 'gospel' to every corner of the kingdom. The theory was that if you repeat a lie often enough, the perception would become reality.
Their idea of "critical thinking" was to simply criticize every "non-progressive" idea as "anti-intellectualism." The flaw in their slaw is that too many people out there in the Heartland still exercise TRUE critical thinking (i.e., see their "new clothes" for what they are: intellectual nudity).
BY THE WAY, another line from my column was "TIMING IS EVERYTHING." The liberals couldn't have chosen a more inopportune time to take a stand for liberal judges — immediately after a Federal judge threw out a pro-marriage law passed by nearly 3/4 of the voters of the state of Nebraska (and let us not forget that the same thing happened in "liberal" California)!
WE ARE APPROACHING YOGI BERRA'S "FORK IN THE ROAD"
THE QUESTION IS, will the United States Congress listen to the "little people"? Will Rogers said, "If you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there." Good advice for both Parties!
"POLITICS ARE NOW NOTHING MORE THAN A MEANS OF RISING IN THE WORLD." — Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Thomas Jefferson said, "Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them [political offices], a rottenness begins in his conduct."
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said, "There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise . . . There be that can pack the cards and yet cannot play well; so there are some that are good in canvasses [elections] and factions, that are otherwise weak men."
This would especially apply to politicians who characterize the extreme as "moderate" and the wise as "extreme." Senators of both stripes are scrambling to avoid a showdown through a so-called "compromise" that would throw out the President's two favorite choices for the Federal appeals courts. Can such an "eagle" fly?
"All colours agree in the dark," said Bacon, but too much light is being thrown on the subject by the alternative media outside the Beltway. Only inside the Beltway is business as usual and surrender perceived as "Progress" and "statesmanship"!
Bacon also said, "It has been well said that the arch-flatterer with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence is a man's self . . . Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time."
If the self-flatterers in Washington can't even get the "history" of the last month straight — or the history of congressional filibusters — we are indeed heading for a shipwreck. The PLAIN TRUTH is that it's going to take an ACT OF CONGRESS to get an up-or-down vote on the President's nominees (something never before denied in the history of this Republic).
WILL THE SENATE HAVE THE COURAGE TO ACT?
"Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds," said the Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773). And I'm including those dates to shame the Senate, if such a thing is even possible. Whether they realize it or not, "Otherwise weak men [and women]" are being put to shame by a handful of words from our past (300 years ago and more, even though our latter-day "statesmen" would rather curry favor from the already-disgraced Mainstream Media than listen to the "little people" in fly-over country).
Even though the Constitution gives the power of appointment to the President, and precedent until now gave "power to the people" through "advice and consent" of Congress, the oligarchy of the Judiciary is being institutionalized before our very eyes by the "mainstreaming" of judges whose first order of business is rewriting the Constitution!
"Set it down to thyself, as well to create good precedents as to follow them . . . A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green." — Francis Bacon
There's a lot of revenge evident in the workings of the minority in Congress — revenge against the estimated 141 million citizens who listen to National Religious Broadcasters instead of the subsidized National Public Radio. Desperate scare tactics notwithstanding, the people are voting with their ears and with the Internet.
The liberals feel the heat, and their fall-back position is coming to be buzzwords such as "common ground" and "moderation." Forced to faced the "God issues," the only god they will acknowledge publicly is that "Deist" God who keeps His hands off (and "therefore, believers should just shut up and let the rest of us run the show"). Who is accusing whom of "obsession with political power"?
The Left will "respect" any religion that keeps its "hands off" in the Deist manner. Claiming to be apostles of enlightenment and modernization, they are especially hateful toward those of us who point out that the Founding Fathers were not Deists.
Benjamin Franklin, the so-called "poster boy" of Deism, wrote the following epitaph for his tombstone:
Benjamin Franklin, printer
(Like the cover an old book,
Its contents worn out,
And stript of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms!
Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more
In a new
And more beautiful edition,
Corrected and amended
By its Author!
SO MUCH FOR "BEN THE DEIST"!
The great "work" of our Founders' lives that is our Heritage is heading for a shipwreck in many, many ways. When "weak minds" will resort to ANYTHING to protect "government of the few, by the few, and for the few" — and when defenders of God-given Rights refuse to take a stand — we might as well all (as Shakespeare said) "die merrily," because — as Napoleon said — "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous."
ON THE OTHER HAND, should they look to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of their intentions (as our Founding Fathers did), their "work itself" SHALL NOT BE LOST!
Thomas Paine said, "One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again." He was alluding to the possibility of rectifying the "mistakes" human nature would be sure to make somewhere down the road.
This month, May of 2005, finds America at a crossroads, and Paine's words to us would probably be:
"The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country."
I HATE TO HAVE TO POINT OUT THE OBVIOUS, BUT WE STILL DO HAVE A CHOICE!
© Curtis Dahlgren
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(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
