The massive corruption bust in New Jersey is one more negative for Gov. Jon Corzine, who saw a cabinet official’s home raided and some close political allies snared. ”The arrests could not have come at a worse time for Corzine, who has trailed Christie in recent polls by 12 to 15 percentage points. President Obama visited the state last week in a bid to rally enthusiasm among Democratic voters. ‘Clearly, this is negative for Corzine,’ said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University. ‘Because so many of the elected officials are Democrats, this gives the Republican opposition cannon fodder to paint Corzine with the brush of Democratic Party corruption.’”
Nothing we can do to affect events in Iran? Poppycock. Eli Lake reports on the latest legislation co-sponsored by Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman: “Targeting the repressive methods of what one senator called a ‘cruel regime,’ the U.S. Senate has authorized up to $50 million to help Iranians evade their government’s attempts to censor the Internet and to pressure foreign corporations not to help Iran clamp down on communication.”
Michael Goodwin on Gates-gate: “In fact, there is no evidence of a racial component other than that Gates is black and Crowley is white. Not every mixed-race argument, even one involving the police, automatically qualifies as a racial incident. Obama, by linking the case to the historically legitimate issue of police abuse of minorities, gave it a gravity it doesn’t deserve. Even worse, making that linkage suggests he buys Gates’ unsupported claim that Crowley’s actions were racist. On what evidence?” Obama doesn’t need evidence; he is teaching us.
Brit Hume says Obama “couldn’t bring himself to apologize” to Sergeant Crowley despite the fact that he “travels the world apologizing for his country.” Bill Kristol is blunt: “He is an arrogant man.”
Another voice warns that Obama is overexposed: “Yes, the President of the United States has become omnipresent on the tube, most recently talking about health-care reform, the deficit and race in his address to the nation on Wednesday night. The hour-long broadcast was his fourth prime-time presidential press conference. But he is risking the possibility of turning off the media — and, in turn, the nation — by continuously failing to make detailed proposals. He has to do more than show up.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell confirms there are no Republican senators who support the public option.
Sen. Kent Conrad says they can’t pass health-care reform without Republican votes. Well, that would mean the public option is a goner.
Rep. Jim Cooper says Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have the votes to pass the liberal Democrats’ health-care bill.
Now this is atrocious marketing: Pelosi tells us health care is another stimulus bill. Right. And since that worked out so splendidly, we should do it again?
Greg Mankiw on CBO’s insistence on playing it straight with the cost of ObamaCare: “Damn that CBO! They keep killing all these great ideas with, like, analysis and numbers and all that stuff. Everything would work out just fine if only they would close their eyes, click their heels together three times, and say, ‘There is no policy like reform . . . there is no policy like reform.”
Pro-Zelaya protests fizzle.
Hillary Clinton tells Moscow to ignore crazy Joe Biden. Well, everyone else does.
“Tragedy requires its protagonist to have no real choice in the matter: Othello had to be Othello.”
Not quite. Tragedy is the struggle of a heroic person with free will against the requirements of fate. And the quality of his struggle wrings the emotion of pity from the audience creating catharsis. The audience identifies with these Tragic Heroes because the individuals of the audience experience the same struggle in their lives. The greatest tragedies contain the fiercest struggles beween free will and fate:Othello,Oedipus,Antigone,Anna Karenina etc. In Medea by Euripides,the Tragic Heroine defeats fate via the intervention of a more powerful god than fate who saves her.
We could be impressed to melancholy by the “trying to run up an escalator that’s going down” metaphor — or we could not.
A couple of thoughts leap to mind. First, anyone who’s ever watched a 14-year-old boy run, effortlessly, up a down escalator knows it can be done. Heck, Marines could run up one for miles in full combat gear and call it a workout. Multiple layers of significance there. Hmmm. Men, anyone? Husbands? Fathers? Well-reared sons? A nation of ordinary heroes, leaping down escalators in single bounds?
The other thought is that which escalator you’re on — and even which way it’s going — depend on a set of human choices. Escalators are often made to reverse direction. Someone appointed to do so makes decisions about which way they are to run. Are we getting this here? Our corporate community choices don’t have to set up a bank of down escalators.
Nor need any of us get on one. That’s the thing about escalators. You can see which way they’re going before you step onto them. How do you learn about the way they operate? Your mother teaches you. You watch the people around you. You absorb the principle into your reflexes early in life.
In any ecalator metaphor, the fault, and the responsibility, lie with us. If we keep THAT in mind, we might learn something from the escalator metaphor.
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It’s not about money. It’s about culture.
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It’s absolutely about the money. Both the British and U.S. governments, in their misguided compassion, get what they pay for, which is single mothers, in battalions. If, through some miracle, welfare payments for single parent families ceased, so too would those families cease to exist. A single mother faced with abject penury would do what’s required to survive and join forces with another, probably a male, and form a family unit. It’s the way organisms work. The current subsidy for single parent families is a significant financial burden on society but is an even greater impediment to the perpetuation of civilization.
Right Chuck, if you want more of a behavior subsidize it, less, you tax it.
It wasn’t long ago that Charles Murray predicted the steady growth of illegitimate births. He said that illegitimacy was, at that time, prevalent in minorities and only slight in non-minorities. However, he was starting to see the beginnings of growth in non-minorities. He predicted its increase and now we have it.
How did we get here?
I think Ted touches on the cause with the following:
“She’s nonjudgmental about the women she knows who sell drugs or steal to support their children.” and with:
“She would have been far, far better off in a traditional two-parent family, with a strong and rigorous school system, going to church, and being surrounded by a culture that taught her a duty to herself and society and taught her to improve herself and to provide for her own needs, that dependency was a sin, that failing to plan ahead was a form of dependency, and that she should have children only after marriage and only when she and her husband had the financial wherewithal to raise them in reasonable surroundings.”
Our society has devalued judgment. No longer is it acceptable to state that something is wrong or right. It’s all gray. And what’s wrong for one is not wrong for another because wrong implies a judgment, a sense of standards. Standards don’t apply in a multi-cultural world because all cultures are equal. Even more so, one culture cannot judge (and is not better than) another. I include the culture of out of wedlock births. Though it’s not called that, it is exactly that. (Jeff Jacobi once wrote that jurors had a hard time with judging others so prevalent was the non-judgmental temperament.)
Following our societal lack of judgment, and a willingness to not judge, is our lack of sin. Ted calls dependency a sin, and it is. But what’s worse is that sin is no longer an evil to be avoided. Sin is out of fashion because religion is out of fashion. When we threw away religion and substituted secularism, we threw away sin. All we have left is, well, nothing. Most everything is permissible, and precious little is prohibited. Legally, we have too much social (e.g, sexual) freedoms and socially very little is taboo.
I can’t help but wonder how far we can go with teenage mothers, children out of wedlock, and fathers (sometimes even mothers) who abandon their children. At what point would these statistics have to climb for society to turn itself around? Is there a point where society simply cannot continue to permit this? If so, what then?
It’s hard to see an end, such is this cycle with its positive reinforcement. After all, children often emulate their parents, especially with teen pregnancies and dependent adults.
If anyone wants to keep up-to-date on the depredations welfare and laws undermining traditional institutions like the family have brought to British society, read Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail online. His book, The Abolition of Britain is also checking out.
“Nor need any of us get on one. That’s the thing about escalators. You can see which way they’re going before you step onto them. How do you learn about the way they operate? Your mother teaches you. You watch the people around you. You absorb the principle into your reflexes early in life.”
Just to point out the obvious, J.E., escalators also go in different directions. To make this analogy work, think of the escalators and stairs at Universal Studios in California. One goes up, the other goes down. There’s a set of traditional stairs on the side of the escalators. Most of us start out in life at the bottom, looking at the escalators and stairs and then we have to make a choice on which to get on. Unfortunately, due to our position in life, most of us will be taking the stairs. So, to prepare for the long haul up the stairs, we try to do things to give us a solid foundation: try to practice abstinence, get a good education or a job that gives valuable experience, build up strong communities and try to stay in monogamist relationships and build families. It’s hard work to go up the stairs, and sometimes others will stumble along the way and take some of the other people down with them, but eventually they get back up and continue going up the stairs. Most conservatives argue that this is the most rewarding path to take: it is hard work and it will take time, but eventually you will get to the top and will be richly rewarded for your hard work.
Then there are others who are lucky and are able to ride up the escalator. These are the trust fund babies or the people who discovered a grand idea that gets them off the stairs and puts them on a path to the escalator going up. Hopefully no one falls from this escalator because once you’re off of it, it’s hard to get back on. However, those who rode the stairs for awhile already discovered the secrets of how to get on the up escalator and it is easier for them to make the transition back to it.
Finally there is the down escalator. Most people are smart enough to know to stay away from this escalator because no good can come of it. People get mired on this escalator because they make a series of bad choices: dropping out of school, getting involved drugs, getting pregnant, getting involved in crime, etc. It’s not impossible to make it up this escalator, but your chances of getting off of it is very low. Most succumb to this pressure, but not all. Famous notables such as Whoopi Goldberg and Charles Gardiner were on this escalator for a long time, but through perseverence and drive they were able to make a transition to the up escalator. How ironic I mention them: in the U.S. the group of people most likely to be trying to go up the down escalator are black folks. Blacks die at a younger age due to crime, have high out-of-wedlock birthrates, drop out of school early, and are almost doomed to be on the public dole for the majority of their lives. To add to this, most liberals want to try to help people go up the up escalator, but in reality the programs that liberals support puts people on the path of the down escalator much to their detriment. However, liberals must be seen as doing something, otherwise, if they were to tell their constituents that they should be trying to go up the stairs and work at trying to go up the stairs as everyone else is, then they too will escape poverty. Yet, liberals cannot bring themselves to accept that it is their policies that is dooming people to forever going up the down elevator.
So, to reiterate what the author of the blog said, trying to traverse life is not at all about finances, but about moral and educational choices made in life. I would actually reduce that down to moral, as I believe it is entirely possible to succeed in life with minimal education, but once you start making bad moral decisions you are setting yourself up for failure.
RCAR (#1) and I can agree for once. It’s the apparent conflict between free will and fate that drives tragedy, our insistence that we will and must have free will even in the face of events that seem to overwhelm us or come upon us in spite of all our struggling. As Schelling wrote about tragedy, “it is a sublime thought to go down with a declaration of free will.” Perhaps this is why Oedipus rakes out his eyes after he learns of murdering his father and sleeping with his mother Jocasta.
To Ted Bromund, I saw amen. And I say amen again to Commander Dyer. The notion that we are all passive sufferers of our fates, that we have no freedom and no personal responsibility for the situations which develop (which *we* develop) in our lives is leading to a breakdown of our best social institutions. Certainly there are cases where there is simply nothing we can do–but those are few and far between. In almost every case, there is much we can do to shape our futures. We should not make a lifetime of poor decisions and then complain when those decisions have not led us to Elysium.
Chris Bolts, Sr., I don’t see how you can read Dyer’s post and not get that she understands that escalators go in both directions, and that’s a part of the point.
“The other thought is that which escalator you’re on — and even which way it’s going — depend on a set of human choices. Escalators are often made to reverse direction…That’s the thing about escalators. You can see which way they’re going before you step onto them…” Etc.
Mom Blogs – Blogs for Moms…
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To Chuck – There is another alternative and that is infanticide, wholesale child abandonment, and abortion especially if Mr. Bromund is right about the erosion of values.