Curtis Dahlgren
August 24, 2007
If you missed last week's column, shame on you, but -- [Part 5]
By Curtis Dahlgren

Nihilism, n.; 1) total rejection of value statements or moral judgments, 2) absolute destructiveness toward the world at large and oneself [nothingness].

IF YOU MISSED LAST WEEK'S COLUMN, HERE'S YOUR SECOND CHANCE:

By going to www.brainyquotes.com and reading a few Orwell quotes, I have belatedly come to realize that he was a greater writer than I even imagined. Today's colleges and universities either quote George Orwell out of context, or, ignore most classical writers (selectively). Orwell was briefly intrigued by British Socialism, but quickly came to see it for what it was — a "rebel without a cause" (sort of like James Dean or Elvis Presley, only more diabolic). As a result, Orwell isn't as "popular" as he once was. He was too much of a "prophet" to have any "honor" among his own people — the English-speaking peoples.

LET'S GO TO THE HORSE'S MOUTH (Orwell's pen) for a few quotations [and a few comments added]:

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

[Sounds like a minister I once had.]

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

[Especially over-educated and over-specialized people.]

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

[So-called "hate" crime laws are going to be the death of Liberty.]

In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

[All "truth" is relative, they say, except that one of course.]

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

[Hugo Chavez comes to mind, doesn't he?]

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

[Jascha Heifetz said, "No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side."]

GOT SOLUTIONS? ORWELL ALSO SAYS:


Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

War is war . . . There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

CONCLUSION

It is most likely true that the biggest flaw of the Lefties who rule institutions of "Higher" learning is that they take themselves too seriously. By extension, their "disciples" — in the mainstream media and the public schools — fall into the same category, sadly.

I can see that I'm overdue to write a column on humor, which as Victor Borge once said, is "the shortest distance between two people."

Jane Fonda's all-feminism-all-the-time radio talk network folded last Friday for good, and probably one of the reasons was the lack of humor.

Back in the 50s (how well I remember), the conservatives (retros) were the ones characterized as "repressed," but now, a half-century later, the liberals (metros) are the ones with all the hang-ups, while conservatives abound in good humor.

Jerry Lewis once said, "Funny had better be sad somewhere."

That was another way of saying that there must be a kernel of truth in your humor, or it is nothing but a bundle of empty straw (the metros probably won't understand the analogy).

Those who attack the humor of Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh wouldn't know a joke if they were "IT" (tag now being banned as "not funny"). By the way, here's a trivia question:

Who said, "It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president . . . except me"? [Al Gore, John Kerry? NO.] *

Konrad Lorenz said, "A man sufficiently gifted with humor is in small danger of succumbing to flattering delusions about himself, because he cannot help perceiving what a pompous ass he would become if he did."

The "offended" are probably more offended by the "pompous" reference there than the reference to the mule.

Those who say "Can't we all just get along?" and "Just be nice" are the same ones who want to get in the first swipe. Then they have their friends in the press play the referee who throws a penalty flag when the conservative responds (like the football player who always gets "caught" swinging back).

* P.S. It was Barry Goldwater who said that America is a great country where anybody can grow up to be president "except me" (proving my point that we "mossbacks" are the ones who can laugh).

Speaking of humor, it's time for my nominations for the column-of-the-week. Co-winners this week are Donald Hank and Paul Greenberg. Greenberg's is a timeless classic — http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/PaulGreenberg/2007/08/20/a_canticle_for_darwin — but Hank's is more on-topic, as related to my current back-to-school series. http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/hank/070820 ["Why must Christians be nicer than Jesus?"]

Here's just one of the pithier excerpts from Hank's column:

"[Dr. Richard] Land then writes 'Ann Coulter further lowered the level of discourse with Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.' He additionally derides Coulter for writing Godless: the Church of Liberalism, actually a remarkably insightful book that I enjoyed immensely. It hurt me to read Land's criticism of this brash, iconoclastic lady who dares to tell the unvarnished truth about the Left with a refreshing and admirable bravado and clarity of mind.

"Coulter herself points out that some people accuse her of being too harsh with liberals but clarifies by reminding us that these are the people who advocate inserting a scissors in the skull of a living full-term baby and extracting its brain. 'You don't want people like that to like you.' Amen, Sister!"

PPS: Timing is everything, and along with my series of back-to-school articles, a significant book was just released by Charles J. Sykes. It's called "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School; Real World Antidotes to Feel-good Education." For a preview, go to www.the50rules.com or, www.amazon.com .

The educrats were howling even before the release of the book, which brings us back to Orwell's classic line:

"Some ideas are so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."

On second thought,
intelligent ought to be in quotation marks.


In a nutshell, my thesis is that Groucho Marx was a lot more "intelligent" than Karl Marx. Groucho once said, "I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book." Karl Marx never wrote anything worthy of repeating, and I haven't watched ABC, NBC, or CBS news (morning or evening) for two or three years! Do you?

As Bess Myerson once said:

"The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference."

We not only get the face we deserve at fifty, but the government — and therefore the
EDUCATION — WE DESERVE.


© Curtis Dahlgren

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
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Curtis Dahlgren

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in the frozen tundra of Michigan's U.P., and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton... (more)

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