Curtis Dahlgren
December 11, 2007
Emancipation, emasculation, and embalming; three reasons to read this column first
By Curtis Dahlgren

"The results were not what the prophets of liberation had envisioned . . Instead of being freed from the oppressive bonds of the past, [man] found himself alone in a world without mooring, norms, sense of direction, or purpose." — Charles J. Sykes

THE PROBLEM WITH THIS AGE IS THAT IT IS ALL SIGNPOSTS AND NO DESTINATION, someone once said, and I would rather have two readers who understand this column completely than two billion who don't understand, or who would mischaracterize it.

Art Linkletter used to say that kids say the "darnedest" things, but nowadays it is our petted professors who say the most outlandish things (such as, "History is history").

Am I repeating myself here? Someone once said, "Good writers are monotonous . . They keep trying to perfect the understanding of the one problem they were born to understand." If you did a search of these columns, you'd find that one of my most repeated words is "paradox." The story of our times is one big paradox that our "secular liberators" just don't GET!

The paradox is, modern man got to the moon and back safely, but you can't deliver a pizza in Milwaukee without getting shot dead. One could say it's an "irony," but to a traditionalist it's a perfectly understandable paradox. What you see is what you get with the wrong kind of liberation: mall shootings, church shootings, and dead pizza deliverymen.

There are causes for every effect, and this is what you GET when the maxims and mores of a false "emancipation" replace the historical morality that placed a higher value than that on the life of a human being. What we have here is some of the most ignorant teachings coming from highly specialized educrats who have no perspective or context.

I overheard more history in first grade than most of today's college grads hear in a lifetime (I would have said "in kindergarten," but we only had six weeks of kindergarten in our one-room school — and they taught us how to read in six weeks!). Public schools these days can't teach kids to read in six years, so they're so "bored" that all they want to do in middle school is have sex.

AL GORE got his "prize" the other day, and he accused us old fogies of being just like the appeasers of Hitler because we want to look at all sides of the "global warming" fad (not just two sides of it, either). Al has it all backwards; the only blitzkrieg going on today is in the mainstream media. The MSM is for global warming and against Christians. In this poisoned atmosphere, with Christians getting shot, WE NEED TO TALK.

It's high time to listen to some our ELDER columnists, not just those who are fresh out of journalism 101. In Monday's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a columnist's headline reads: "Will war on science be stopped?"

Talk about false dichotomies, straw persons, and blue herrings!

Robyn Blumner announces, "You don't produce doctors and scientists by teaching science from the Bible. Period."

[DUH. We all know now that we produce doctors with affirmative action and by importing them because our public schools are so incompetent.]

Speaking about traditional Christians, Blumner says, "These are the kinds of dim-witted people that have been elevated to key posts in the Bush administration . . . with Mitt Romney promising that his [faith] is not too weird."

[DUH. How does one refute a sneer, a snarl, and a smirk?]

Another article in Monday's paper, "from the Washington Post," was "Ice sheet collapse blamed for flood":

"The researchers believe that 'Noah's flood' was caused by the collapse of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which led to a deluge that raised global sea levels by 4.5 feet . . "

Here again, "researchers" are overrunning their headlights in their headlong charge into the "crusading" Christians. These "they-say" scientists are obviously not as smart as they think they are.

I have been to the mountaintop, and to Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Anyone who has flown over the western third of the United States can see that a flood of some kind had to have washed away all that dirt, including the heart of the Grand Canyon. However:

The erosion of the rock on Devil's Tower actually shows that there have been at least two great floods. The last one washed away about 4/5 of the dirt that once covered the "tower," while a previous flood washed away the rest of it (the top of the rock is more highly eroded).

Now this is "science," but even geology is a science we only partly understand. The Devil's Tower evidence points to two "great floods," so you can cut the theological speculations, please. At least one of these floods was no doubt caused by the end of one Glacial Age, but this implies cooling as well as "global warming" periods. When "news stories" editorialize about "Noah's flood" [smirk], you know for sure only that someone has an axe to grind and an agenda!

Another
"news story" in Monday's paper "reports" that:

"By the end of the century, the climate in much of the southern United States will not be within the current known climatic tolerances for most of the 130 [tree] species in this study." Now, part of this could be true (why do you think I moved north when I retired?), but this "report" also predicts that North America's tree line will move 400 miles north due to climate change, and that this "march" will bring sugar maples to the shores of Hudson Bay. So?

The newest catchword, "climate change" implies there are cycles in this solar system that are not "man-made" and could also be reversed by nature. Some things are just beyond our control, politics notwithstanding (did you hear, there was a 7.4 earthquake in the Caribbean last week that "caused panic as far away as Venezuela and Puerto Rico"?).

[There was also a political earthquake in Venezuela, but that's a story for another day.]

Speaking of Mitt Romney, his speech last week caused panic in the mainstream media. The most "shocking" part of it for the MSM was when he quoted John Adams [eeeww]. Television reporters acted as if they had never heard of a John Adams, let along his famous quote that "this constitution was made for a religious people," that you can't have liberty without religion.

The liberal bloggers are in such a panic that they act as if, should another Christian be elected President, the witch trials will "begin in five minutes." By the way, the timing of Romney's speech, I think, could have had something to do with the fact that Alan Keyes will be participating in the Iowa "debate." I don't know if Romney was heading Alan off at the pass, but I'm certainly pleased that he said what he said!

The secular liberals' reaction reveals the soft underbelly of the "progressive" movement: ignorance of history coupled with a craving for raw political power. For them, "history" begins with the Summer of Love, 1967. Nostalgic books and articles are being published to try to revive the "spirit of the 60s."

You can buy Tom Brokaw's book for $28.95, but I'd bet that he doesn't say a word about the fact that our hippies were only carbon copy cats of the "60s" Nihilists in Russia (the 1860s), a fact that you could have gotten for nothing from this column.
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/031020 Those Nihilists assassinated a Czar in 1881 and they "pioneered" the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that killed the entire family of the Czar. And a nation.

They were promising "liberty" of course, although anyone who disagreed with their agenda was subject to being sent to a mental hospital for "reeducation." In real life, words mean things, but not even "liberty" does on a secular planet with four moons. What we have here is a "failure to communicate."

Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot are what you get, ultimately, when you follow the primrose path pushed by the MSM and our publishing industry. Mort Sahl said, "Hitler said that he always knew he could buy the press. What he didn't know was he could get them cheap."

Jason Epstein, then editor-in-chief of Random House said, "There is no such thing as a New York intellectual establishment. It just looks that way from the outside."

Yes, it looks that way from the outside when they are wringing their hands over Hugo's defeat in the "constitutional" referendum. When history begins for you in 1967, you now don't trust anyone over the age of 70.

I'm not THAT old, but my father saw Teddy Roosevelt when he was running for Prez, and my life has overlapped Pearl Harbor, the fall of Cuba, and the 9-11 attack. I was conceived in November 1941, which is perhaps what the Japanese were so ticked off about.

A little humor there. But someone once said that the trouble with our Age is that it is all signposts and no destination. When you can't see very far into the past, you can't see very far into the future (to paraphrase someone else).

By the way, did you know that you can now get a degree in "Futurism"? The University of Houston offers one, and futurists are predicting (global warming or no global warming) that technology will soon get to the point of implanting artificial intelligence into human beings, and that machine intelligence will "outstrip" the biological at an exponential rate.

"Fans approach the concept with an almost religious fervor," writes Niki Denison in On Wisconsin magazine (winter 2007). Her article, "Time Travel," ends with a much-welcomed twist, with quotes from futurist David Zach — pointing us "backwards" as much as FORWARD (Wisconsin's motto).

If I may, here are some excerpts with the gist of Zach's conclusions:

"In a time of tumultuous change, when we can't possibly keep up, [Zach] advises that we have to 'figure out the things that don't change — and when we find those, it gives you a place to stand . . Sometimes the most radical thing to do is to not change.'

"He describes his favorite futurist as G.K. Chesterton, because he believes that Chesterton embodies something we are short of in our modern era: the willingness to learn from the past. 'The more things change,' Zach says, 'the more we need to learn from the past. We live in an age where anything is possible, but that's scary, because not all things should be possible.'

"Chesterton advocated, he says, 'giving votes to our ancestors. We assume today is the most important thing and dismiss the past, blaming the past. History is full of accomplishments, and we should have gratitude for them. We have temporal arrogance.'"

WOW! I was shocked, just shocked, to read words such as those in a publication of the University of Wisconsin (Madison) Alumni Association. By the way, most of today's UW students wouldn't be able to define the word "temporal" to save their lives, or eternities.

CONCLUSION

"Emancipation," "emasculation," and "embalming." What did those words have to do with this week's column? Well, in most dictionaries, those words fall in consecutive order, and they sum up the cycle in the rise and fall of great nations:

Liberation is followed by false notions of "liberty" in which it is defined as "the right to do anything we want" — as opposed to the right to do what we "OUGHT" (in the words of Lord Acton).

Then, as history is forgotten, leaders become emasculated by false notions of "enlightenment." They become impotent at passing on their culture to future generations (in the generic sense
, emasculation refers to the inability to procreate, so it can be applied to either gender).

When culture and science are no longer "restrained" by common sense and "natural law," the only thing left for a society is the embalming of it. That's why Albert Einstein said that "science without God" is NOT GOOD.

That's a paraphrase, but in any debate between Robyn Blumner and "dim-wits" like Einstein, put me down as agreeing with ol' Alberto any day!


P.S. My dictionary fell open to the N-words one day, and I couldn't help noticing that "nihilism" falls halfway between "niggling" and "nincompoop." Our 1960s hippies were perfect examples of "niggling" — a craving for undue attention. Their philosophy of "nihilism" brought us the anarchy we have in the United States today.

NINCOMPOOPS!

© 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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