Curtis Dahlgren
In lieu of a year-end brag letter: "GOT PEACE"?
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By Curtis Dahlgren
January 3, 2009

"Do good, O Lord, unto those who be good, and to those who are upright in their hearts." — King David

"Liberals seen to have hit upon a reverse Christ story as their belief system. He suffered and died for our sins; liberals make the rest of us suffer for sins we didn't commit." Ann Coulter (GUILTY: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America)

SO ONE FETUS SAYS TO THE OTHER FETUS: "How are you doin'?"

"I'M STILL KICKING," says the other. "How're you doing?"

"I CAN'T KICK," says the first one. "MY mother 'aborted' me."

"Maybe I'd better go easy on the kicking," says the other. "Maybe my mother will let me live."

After awhile, the living fetus says, "Mommy, Mommy — what does abortion have to do with the Right to 'privacy'?" His mother mutters to herself:

"Quit your kicking and leave me and your father ALONE!"

Later, the same fetus says, "Mommy, Mommy — now that I survived the abortion, can you tell me what does the Fairness doctrine have to do with 'fairness'?"

"Shut up and leave me and your stepfather alone," is the reply. "And quit calling me 'mommy'!"

"Yes, your honor."

"That's better," says his mother. "I'm studying a very important animal cruelty case. We're trying to add another animal to the endangered species list?"

"But what about US?", the toddler thinks to himself. So it goes, beyond the Rabbit Hole in Topsy-turveydom.

I guess I'm thinking about babies because they used to have cartoons at this time of year showing Father Time (the previous year) and Baby New Year. I didn't see those much this year. I think Father 2008 stuck his sythe into Baby 2009 and sucked his brains out like a vampire, in a fit of road rage on his way out of town.

Oh, and Sarah Palin has become a Grammaw. Bristol gave birth to a 7 pound blob of tissue and, for the mainstream news media, that now makes TWO Palin pregnancies that "should" have been "interrupted" or "terminated." At least two!

Speaking of "word spin," there isn't much difference between euphemizing and euthanizing (the state of Washington voted to "legalize" assisted suicide, in a further decline of traditional values for Western Civilization). Western Europe has been there, done that, before! In the Weimar Republic of Germany, legal and medical "experts" began pushing a belief in a two-tiered human race:

There were those whose lives were "devoid of value," and then there were the survivors. What was theory in the classroom in the 1920s became the practice of the government in the 1930s (and compliance with one's own elimination wasn't "voluntary" either)! Anyone who was so "backward" as to try to defend the "useless eaters" was sent to the same fate as the "useless eaters."

Dissent was considered "polarization." Like global "warming," the debate had been "settled" and the time for "action" had come — the Holocaust.

An accute observor can tell when a Republic has died even before it becomes obvious to most other people: it's when the value of human life, and the right to property, become extinct. Pragmatic "progressivism" becomes the new paradigm.

Dissent is not to be TOLERATED in Alice's Wonderland of Topsy-turveydom. "Right and wrong" are no longer absolute - except in the case of those views which are politically "correct."

And if you wonder which views those are, don't worry — the State will tell you that! The year just past left many clues as to how far along the road to despotism we are. The firebombing of Sarah Palin's church is being investigated by the buro of 'alcohol, tobacco, etc' (which is the same buro that accidently burned down a religious compound in Texas in 1993).

In Sacramento, Moonbeam McBrown is trying to throw out Proposition 8 along with the babys' bath water. The next step to look for, in a government "of the judges, by the judges, and for the judges," is for the A.G. of the U.S. to proclaim a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy for Christians (i.e., "Don't practice your faith openly, and we won't sic the IRS on you").

Such policies have been discussed behind the closed doors of Academia for at least a century, but of late their agenda of creating a "secular society" — with the churches driven underground as in the old Soviet Union or Red China — is discussed out of the closet.

"A world with no religion" isn't just music to their ears anymore. If you think I exaggerate, I suggest reading 'The Tyranny of Nice' by Kathy Shaidle and Pete Vere. North of the border, pastors can be criminally prosecuted for uttering beliefs that have been common knowledge for thousands of years.

Pat Buchanan warned us of a Culture War in 1992. He was speaking figuratively, but we have wasted most of the past decade and a half, and so now the radical "gays" and radical atheists are taking the Culture "War" to the next level. Timing is everything, and now, with a convenient economic recession, the sheep-people want economic "security" above all else, just as during the Weimar Republic.

In a "world-without-religion," Communism resulted in the execution of about 100 million people in Eurasia in the last century. I hate to repeat the obvious, but don't forget that fascism and Naziism in Italy and Germany was also in part a misguided reaction to the Russian threat during the 1920s, resulting in additional 50 million World War II deaths.

There's another new book out, by an Englishman, that explains "how, with the collapse of Communism, Far Left ideologies meeded a new cause that combined high-mindedness, control-freakery, and austerity with a burning hatred of capitalism." James Delingpole says that they found this "cause" in radical environmentalism. The title of his book is Welcome to Obamaland; I've Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work.

CONCLUSIONS

"Give him a chance,"
we are lectured about the President-elect. Well, maybe he will "change" even himself. I certainly HOPE so, and if he were to do so, and become a hawk on human life, property rights, border, language, and culture (including the religious history of the United States), I might become an Obama fan myself.

The year 2008 ended with a war going on in the Middle East yet — I mean the one in Gaza, but the news media is still talking about the mysterious coming of a new White House dog. Columnist Gene Lyons says that no matter breed the Obamas choose, "pundits will assess its symbolic meaning."

As humor goes, that issue is okay, but the unstated question remains, "Do liberal pundits ever get around to anything beyond the symbolic?"

Iranian missles in Gaza are within range of 500,000 Israelis and possibly a nuclear facility near Beersheba, and we're wondering what kind of a dog the Obamas are going to choose! [I don't mean to ramble; like I say, I'm multi-tasking.]


Most radio talk show hosts took the week off between Christmas and New Year, but Michael Savage went to work even on New Year's Day. He said that on New Year's eve, there was a 9-11 call every seven seconds in England (drunken brawls and floozies in the gutter, etc.). Old Edmund Burke must be spinning in his grave. A couple of Burke quotations:

"There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all, the law of our creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations."

"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up their own."

[I guess slogans trumped specific principles even in the "culture wars" of Burke's times, but this is getting ridiculous. We may or may not have reached the point of no return in our 100-year slide into nihilism and hedonism.]

The proponents of false "tolerance" are leading us into despotism, not beside the still waters. "Great peace have they who love thy law, and nothing shall offend them," says the Book, but the cultural revolutionaries — by their constant complaints of being "offended" by religion — are their own worst enemies.

They obviously don't "love" the Law that Burke described. And obviously, they are also "offended" (surprise, surprise)!

P.S.
Perhaps the beginning of a "new year" (whenever yours is) is one time that even the "avant gard progressives" can't accuse us of "trying to turn back the clock" if we look backward for some context and perspectives.

The word-for-the-day, boys and girls is "Sankofa." I just learned it in a December 29th forum article in the USA TODAY (by Stephen Prothero). To borrow half of one paragraph here:

"In the Akan language of West Africa there is a concept called Sankofa. San means return; ko means 'go'; and 'fa' means 'take.' So Sankofa refers to returning to fetch something you once discarded so you can take it back home. A popular symbol used to represent this concept depicts a mythical bird that flies forward with its head turned back."

AMERICA HAS DISCARDED MOST OF ITS FOUNDING VALUES. MAYBE IT'S TIME TO "GO BACK" AND "FETCH" WHAT HAS BEEN DISCARDED.

Prothero says that "those who practice Sankofa in [the West African] tradition, by taking the best from the past into the future, are understood to be wise. There isn't much of this ideal in America."

MORE TO COME.

© Curtis Dahlgren

 

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Curtis Dahlgren

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in southern Wisconsin, 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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