Da neuter da better?; Where is Ward Cleaver, now that we really really need him?

By Curtis Dahlgren

"Western civilization would not be the first to reshape others in its own image, only to discover that it had lost the identity, confidence, and will to survive." — Lady Margaret Thatcher

WE WERE WARNED THAT THERE WOULD BE WEEKS LIKE THIS. Last week a high school boy won the "right" to wear a skirt to school. A Los Angeles Times columnist said that he cannot support our troops. Hamas, a terrorist group originally funded by the Israelis to counter Arafat, won an election that was promoted by the State Department. Even Oprah Winfrey had to blush at the week's developments. The difference between the genders is becoming so blurred that Gov Schwarzenegger is thinking about moving out of California.

I made that last part up, but Isaiah and others "called" this situation a long time ago:

"And I will give children to be their princes, and 'babes' shall rule over them . . . The child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honorable."

The following words are like hitting a perfect landing, not after a 300 foot ski jump, but after a nearly 3,000 year time warp:

"For behold, the Lord of hosts doth take away the mighty man, the judge, the prophet, the prudent, and the ancient, the honorable man and counsellor, and the eloquent orator."

THE ELOQUENT ORATOR part is obvious, given the nature of the public schools, and it seems that the rest of it is all falling into place.

The "mighty" man: Ariel Sharon gives away land won the hard way and goes into a coma (sad, but Michael Savage says he's been in a coma for a long time already).

"The judge": A judge somewhere gave that kid the "OK" to dress like a girl in school (whether it offends anyone or not), and last week's column — www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/060123 reported that a judge gave probation for the slashing of over 40 tires in Milwaukee (it should have been a Federal case of election tampering).

"The prophet": The Church of What's Happening Now is more "upbeat" than the OLD ones. If the preacher slips in a moment of weakness and utters the Truth, he is forced to apologize. The only sin left is in the defining of it.

"The prudent": Isaiah's original Hebrew word refers to men who can divine "the Right Thing to do" based on eternal principles, traditions built on a Rock, Natural Law, etc. (i.e., "conserve"-atives, as opposed to a liberal Supreme Court built on sand. QUICK sand)!

"The ancient": Gone are all the MacArthurs, Churchills, Reagans, and even Meirs.

"The honorable man and counsellor": The great writers of the 18th and 19th century are long forgotten. Even journalists in the first half of the 20th century made positive contributions, but (as Savage says) if we had had today's journalists back in the 1940s, you would either be speaking German now or you'd be a lamp shade.

Our first "counsellors" in life outside the family are our teachers, and they are being forced by the ex-hippies in the "administrative offices" and Schools of education to teach that all allusions to religion are verboten — even as history! (which is an urban legend). Propaganda trumps even a kid's right to know how to read and write. "Just let the television set finish his/her education."

Teachers blame their failures on bad parenting, and it never dawns on them that bad parenting is the Natural result of an absence of religion in the mind of man. Our Founding Fathers didn't waste time worrying if someone somewhere might be "offended" by references to God. I could cite their own words, but I've done that many times already. For example, "Will the real Thomas Jefferson please STAND UP?" www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/040128 exactly two years ago.

Lincoln said, "It is no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation."

The so-called anti-war protestors of the 1960s were advocating the victory of our enemies, and did real damage (just ask a Cambodian about the history of his people), but they were only a small percentage of our college population at the time. Today those same anti-Americans want to relive their "hey day" and they have weaseled their way into positions of influence where they can do some REAL damage this time — by brainwashing the upcoming generation.

"As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, those who lead you cause you to err, and destroy the way of your paths." — Isaiah

The world doesn't need more "Road Maps"; we need the guidance of a spiritual GPS. Where are Ozzie and Harriet and Ward and June, now that we really need them? Where are the preachers who will dare say, in the words of Isaiah, "Say to the righteous, that it shall be well with him, for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. And woe unto the wicked — for the reward of his hands shall be given unto him."

Too many of our preachers have been feminized, either figuratively or literally. Highly paid politicians are deathly afraid of what their wives will say when they get home at night. Journalists willingly abdicate the responsibility to give good advice, looking only for political leverage to continue the anti-American agenda. Academics are willing to punt on first down. Most of the mainstream publishing industry, obviously, has very little concern about the Truth (as Oprah found out).

Was Isaiah saying that women "rule" over the people or just over the kids? Actually it's both, and it can take very very subtle forms. Even the weather gals and readers-of-the-news on the cable networks are more concerned about how they look than about the content of the "news" they're reading, because their looks are actually a control mechanism. Most the time they show just enough of their chests so that even if they can't control our opinions, they can at least control the eyes of their male viewers. This is symptomatic of a larger problem here.

THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM

I belong to a local writers' group that starts each meeting by writing a brief statement about a topic; this week the topic was, "He held the phone tightly in his hand and turned to his wife." I finished the sentence this way:

"Your son is in jail. They gave him one phone call. He's calling to ask whom he should call. What shall I tell him?"

I envision this father or step-father as a geeky academic who can use the correct word for WHO in two or three languages, but who had left the "rearing" of the boy to females all the way from day care to college. He's the anti-Ward Cleaver. He may have two or three degrees, but not a lick of common sense (need I translate that term for you?).

In far too many homes, there wouldn't even be a man around to pick up the phone. The "War on poverty" was in fact a war on the Father-who-knows-best. No young man can compete with the "free dollars" from Washington, so he takes a hike, becoming the hated "deadbeat dad." And if he lives in Wisconsin, even the governor encourages him to drop out of school so as to keep the "test scores" up for the union teachers.

Aspiring black scholars are denied access to the schoolhouse door, the door of the Choice school, and "community leaders" don't have a clue as to what's causing the murder rate to rise.

You've probably heard about the mother of 14 who was arrested in Milwaukee the other day. Three of her boys were found "hiding out" in a cold abandoned house, supposedly to get away from abuse. I've heard that the mother worked 2 shifts as a nursing assistant to feed the brood (she's pregnant with the 15th). I haven't heard word one about any father/fathers in the house, but the schools say they never saw signs of abuse. It will probably all boil down to a typical situation of latch-key kids again — lacking the presence of either a mother or a man in the house — so the kids got into the habit of just running away. It's "a sad world after all."

IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RUIN A CHILD

The opinion leaders today are the pop culture (movies, rap music, TV); educators who literally don't want kids to read TOO WELL, lest they go out and (God forbid!) discover facts on their own; and the justice system described in last week's column.

President Monroe, in his first inaugural address said, "While then [America] retains its sound and healthful state, everything will be safe. They will choose competent and faithful representatives for every department. It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment and an usurper soon found: the people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."

Since the average college student today couldn't define the word "usurpation" (or sovereignty) to save his life, I don't need to add much to Monroe's words. Am I making any sense here? I've been accused of being "sick" more than once in my life, and maybe you have too, but we're not alone anymore!

Some points are worth belaboring: More and more people are becoming aware of the basic principles of those real men who founded America.

SPEAKING OF REAL MEN -

This brings us back to that kid wearing a dress to school. I don't know if it was the performance of the U.S. Senate that brought it on, but the big topic of the week in talk radio and on the blogosphere was manliness, and/or the lack thereof, in society. Rush Limbaugh last Friday quoted an essay by Gerard Vanderleun that was written in response to the L.A. columnist who despises our troops:

"You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it. The voice whisps across your ears as if the speaker is in a state of perpetual uncertainty with every utterance. It is as if, male or female, there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise. As a result, it has a misty quality to it that denies it any unique character at all. It is the Valley Girl variation . . . It's parting wistful wish for you is that you 'Have a good one.'

"Above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a 'gay' voice. Not that at all. It is neither that gentle nor that musical . . . No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all.

"It is . . the voice of the neutered. And in this I mean that of the transitive verb: To castrate or spay. The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned."

Needless to say, it isn't the voice of a Ward Cleaver, or a Douglas MacArthur, but it goes on to say:

"This is not to say that the new American Castrati of all genders live sexless lives. On the contrary, if reports are to be credited, they seem to have a good deal of sex, most often without the burden of love or the threat of children, and in this they are condemned to the sex life of children."

[You can read more of the essay at http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/006007.php#006007 or www.rushlimbaugh.com ]

Here's the line that really stood out for me:

"No, it is only to say that this new voice that we hear throughout the land, from so many of the young, betokens a weaker and less certain brand of citizen than we have been used to in our history. Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither ... well, not anything substantive really. A generation finely tuned to irony and nothingness . . . "

WHERE HAVE WE HEARD ALL THIS BEFORE?

This is nothing new — "there is nothing new under the sun" — but "nothingness" is the philosophy of the 60s — the 1860s — in Russia: the young nihilists spoken of by Turgueniev in the novel "Fathers and Children" (1862). To make a long story short, the philosophy of nihilism is, essentially, the belief in NOTHING. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, says:

"Among the students of the universities and the higher technical schools Turgueniev had noticed a new and strikingly original type — young men and women in slovenly attire, who called in question and ridiculed the generally received convictions and respectable conventionalities of social life, and who talked of reorganizing society on strictly scientific principles.

"They reversed the traditional order of things even in trivial matters of external appearance, the males allowing their hair to grow long and the female adepts cutting it short, and adding sometimes the additional badge of blue spectacles. Their appearance, manners and conversation were apt to shock ordinary people, but to this they were profoundly indifferent, for they had raised themselves above the level of so-called public opinion, despised Philistine respectability, and rather like to scandalize people still under the influence of what they considered antiquated prejudices . . .

"With the impulsiveness of youth and the recklessness of inexperience, the students went in this direction much farther than their elders, and their reforming zeal naturally took an academic, pseudo-scientific form. Having learned the rudiments of [legal] 'positivism,' they conceived the idea that Russia had outlived the religious and metaphysical stages of human development, and was ready to enter on the positivist stage.

"She ought, therefore, to throw aside all religious and metaphysical conceptions, and to regulate her intellectual, social and political life by the pure light of natural science."

DOES ALL THIS START TO SOUND MORE FAMILIAR NOW?

I repeat, these are the 1860s, not the 1960s! This 1910 Britannica goes on to say:

"Among the antiquated institutions which had to be abolished as obstructions to real progress, were religion, family life, private property and centralized [authority]. Religion was to be replaced by the exact sciences, family life by free love, private property by collectivism, and centralized administration by a federation of independent communes.

"Such doctrines could not, of course, be preached openly under a paternal, despotic government, but the press censure had become so permeated with the prevailing spirit of enthusiastic liberalism, that they could be artfully disseminated under the disguise of literary criticism and fiction, and the public very soon learned the art of reading between the lines . . .

"The propagandists were recruited chiefly from the faculty of physical science in the universities, from the Technological Institute, and from the medical schools . . . Some disguised themselves as artisans or ordinary laborers . . whilst others settled in the villages as school-teachers, and endeavored to stir up disaffection among the recently emancipated peasantry . . .

"Some of the Nihilists maintained that things were not yet ripe for a rising of the masses [but] the majority, however, were too impatient for action to listen to such counsels for prudence, and . . . In a brochure issued in 1874 one of the most influential leaders (Tkatchev) explained that the object of the revolutionary party should be, not the preparation of revolution in general, but the realization of it at the earliest possible moment . . .

"In accordance with the fashionable doctrine of evolution, the reconstruction of society on the tabula rosa might be left, it was thought, to the spontaneous action of natural forces . . "

EERY PARALLELS

An attempt to assassinate the Tsar was made in 1866, and Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in March of 1881, almost exactly 100 years prior to the attempted assassination of President Reagan. Another 25 years would go by before the hollow "victory" of the Bolshevists in 1917.

My question is, what is America going to experience between now and the centennial of the Russian Revolution?

The Red Chinese, the Islamo-fascists, and Fascism in general would equally love to slice up America's abundant sacred Heritage.

"Bye bye Miss American pie; I drove my Chevy to the levee, and the levee was dry."

CONCLUSION

As I said, there is nothing new under the sun, but that is always the "package" the old lies are presented in; university professors preach their "New" truths to young people who are led to believe that they are the most highly evolved generation in history, having all these "new things" revealed that no other generation has ever known. Same old, same old — different year!

The concluding words to this column are words that I now consider to be the quotation of the century, perhaps the quotation of the last 200 years. G.K. Chesterton said:

"So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated."

© Curtis Dahlgren