A bracing 7 AM splash of cold water

I had the pleasure of addressing the local Sunrise Rotary Club this morning. Here's a transcript of my remarks:

Thank goodness for my blog. It permits me to address, one by one, specific issues and developments on the national and world stages at leisure. Well, maybe not leisure. After all, I call it Late in the Day in order to convey some sense of the urgency of our juncture as a civilization.

I have to approach my opinion column for The Republic somewhat differently. Since it only appears every six weeks, I feel like each installment should be as comprehensive a snapshot as I can take of the economic, cultural and geostrategic state in which we find ourselves. There is no aspect of that, it seems to me, that can be given short shrift.

History shows us that there is always an ample supply of pressing, and distressing, developments on humanity’s plate. Clearly, though, there are periods in which they are piled particularly high. I am firmly convinced that, in the 56 years I’ve been traipsing this globe, I have never seen such a towering mountain of peril.

I’ve concluded that the terms “grown up” and “civilized” are at least largely synonymous. If you think about the traits one ascribes to someone fitting either description, there is a lot of overlap. “Wisdom,” “initiative,” “dignity,” “self-restraint,” “loyalty,” “logic,” “refinement,” and “ability to see one’s long-term best interest” are common to both characterizations, are they not?

And collectively, we have descended from our peak of each. Indeed, we have fallen far. We have fallen so far that Western civilization probably won’t last much longer.

I wish I could accurately be accused of hyperbolic alarmism in making such an assertion. I’d rather be brought up short for shortcomings as a cultural observer than to experience what I am going to experience as the decline becomes exponential.

Because a twenty-minute talk sports similar constraints to a once-every-six-weeks, 600-word column, I won’t delve into the arcane details of any one front of our current predicament, which might, as the clock ticks, be done at the expense of others that are equally important. You’re all smart people. You’ll get it if I employ some shorthand for each of them.

The economic front: Greek taxi driver riots in the face of austerity measures to get another round of still-inadequate bailout money. 45.75 million Americans on food stamps. US federal debt growth in the last three years that took from 1776 to the mid-1990s to achieve the first time.

The cultural front: Lady Gaga performing for a former president. Jersey Shore. Transgendered bathrooms. Occupy Wall Street. Channeled-entity seminars. Speech codes.

The geostrategic front: Iran’s nuclear program. Continued North Korean extortion tactics in talks about its nuclear program. Pakistan’s ISI’s involvement in attacking the US embassy in Kabul. The Islamist character of the Arab spring. Hezbollah training facilities in Venezuela.

Once one begins unpacking just about any of these phenomena, it becomes plain that there are implications on several fronts.

The Solyndra bankruptcy makes for a fine case in point. I remember helping to install a solar panel on a vegetable-drying shed at a hippie commune in Tennessee in the summer of 1980. By then, there was a confluence of such factors as the whole get-off-the-power-grid / ascribe-cosmic-significance-to-sunlight / Mother Earth News / sustainability impetus, as well as the alarmism spawned by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Erlich’s population predictions, as well as the New Left notion that there was some kind of monolithic power structure behind society’s industrialization. At that point, solar panel-ism, which I’m using as shorthand to also include wind turbines and biofuels, wore the smiley face of the pony-tailed hammer-swinger in the backwoods, whistling his day away providing for his family, which, according to him, consisted not just of spouse and offspring, but all the inhabitants of his collective farm. Then came the fraudulent notion that “the planet” was in some kind of dire trouble, rapidly cooling or warming or flooding or drying up. Big-money investors in enterprises that were going to make this stuff on a mass scale, as well as a United Nations panel and several university research institutes devoted to perpetuating this fraud, pushed the idea on the public that it was urgent to sign on to alternatives to fossil fuel. Now we’re at the point where ridiculously inefficient solar panels, hybrid cars and wind farms get propped up - have to get propped up in order to survive day-to-day - by federal subsidies. And that paves the way for good old-fashioned cronyism on a large scale not only distorting the market value of every kind of energy, but lining the pockets of ambitious politicians with madly utopian aims. In the Solyndra case this was exemplified by investor George Kaiser, who visited the White House numerous times around the time that the Department of Energy cut loose the government guarantees for Solyndra. Then there’s the ever-more-stringent EPA regulations on matters that ought to be between consumer and producer, such as mileage standards for vehicles, not to mention the wince-inducing spectacle of vehicle and engine makers obsequiously acquiescing to the leviathan state’s demands.

It’s all based on a cartoonish notion that actually profitable enterprises that efficiently produce energy at prices consumers find appealing would foul our air and water without hesitation if they weren’t constrained by state edict and state-subsidized “competition.” That notion is a manifestation of an even more basic perversion, namely, that there is something morally flawed with fundamental aspects of the human character such as ambition and progress.

In his new book After America, Mark Steyn makes the point that, since the 1970s, the only area of invention and leaps forward in the way human life is condiucted has been the realm of information. Yes, since then, we have gone from mainframes to smartphones. But it’s been decades since we made anything comparably revolutionary to the automobile or the airplane. We quit going to the moon after three years. We’re not even doing shuttle flights anymore. NASA now exists, in the words of its current administrator, to “make Muslim countries feel better about themselves.”

Speaking of Muslims, let’s look at how this whole business about “diversity” plays itself out in postmodern America. Here’s a really recent example: earlier this month, an organization formed at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s called Students for Justice in Palestine held a three-day training program at Columbia University to prepare students around the country to participate in next year’s annual Israel Apartheid Week. How obscene is that? “Apartheid” was, of course, South Africa’s official policy of strict racial segregation that was ended by referendum in 1992. Israel, the only Western nation in the Middle East, has, while it asserts a Jewish national identity, Muslim Arabs serving in its legislature, teaching in its universities and engaging in the country’s commercial life alongside Jewish citizens. Most Israeli Arabs have no interest in moving to the West Bank and certainly not Gaza. Per the SJP’s website, its endorsers include MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Princeton University professor Cornel West. It receives funding from the Muslim Brotherhood.

In February 2010, at UC Irvine, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech was disrupted by students shouting “Mass murderer!” Granted, eleven of them were arrested and sentenced to community service, but this was no isolated incident.

In March of this year, according to Stella Paul, writing at the American Thinker, “Jessica Felber, a twenty-year-old student at UC Berkeley, filed a federal lawsuit against UC's Regents, accusing them of failing to protect her civil rights as a Jew. Felber was holding a sign saying "Israel Wants Peace," when the head of Students for Justice in Palestine rammed her with a shopping cart, requiring her to get medical care. Her assailant was a known provocateur who'd been implicated in other assaults, without disciplinary repercussions.”

How pervasive is this trend? Well, in 2003, Barack and Michelle Obama attended a dinner in Chicago for Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO advisor who was moving to New York to take a teaching post at Columbia. By the way, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were at that dinner, too. Anyway, Obama gave some warm remarks, saying that his times at the Khalidi home had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”…

Why is any of this central to a discussion about our advanced stage of civilization rot? Because, as I say, Israel is the only Western nation in the Middle East. It occupies one-sixth of one percent of all the land in the Middle East. It is a representative democracy with a vibrant economy. It is home to the roots of our philosophy of law, our notions about how what a family is, and our understanding of the nature of our creator and our relationship to Him.

That must be considered when one contemplates this administration’s attempts to demand that Israel cede sacred land for the creation of a Palestinian state. Simply put, do you want the Garden of Gesthemane under Hamas jurisdiction?

This comes down to the same self-loathing that is at the core of the environmentalist example. It’s been central to the anti-West impulse going back to the days when New Left academic pioneer William Appleman Williams, who taught history at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, introduced the doctrine of moral equivalence. In his time, he was speaking of equivalence between the West and the Soviet bloc. The basic concept survived the Cold War, though. Witness the number of people who have disparaged the measures America took in response to 9/11.


And the foundation of all this is a worldview based on relativism. An absence of absolutes. That leads to a lackadaisical attitude toward completely changing the meaning of terms whose dictionary definitions have been established for centuries, basic terms such as “man,” “woman” “parent” and “family.” We’re at the juncture where any mom or dad watching “Dancing With the Stars” with her or his eight-year-old is faced with the question of how to explain Chaz Bono.

Now that we live in an age in which ephemeral “feelings” are the prime gauge by which we should set a course of action, we can invent ourselves moment by moment, completely on impulse. That’s called narcissism.

Narcissism leads to chaos, because no one can depend on the permanence of any of society’s institutions. I am what I say I am. God is what I say God is.

That leaves a fertile hunting ground indeed for those whose main aim is power over a mass of human beings bumping into each other like corralled cattle. They may exercise that power in the name of social justice, or they may exercise it in the name of sharia law. Whatever they call their ideology, it amounts to convincing us that fairness is the most important condition of human well-being rather than freedom, and that they, in their self-proclaimed wisdom, reserve the right to define “fairness” for the rest of us.

When nothing really means anything to us anymore, well accept state-issued gruel as our lot. In fact, we’ll do so convinced that it’s the noble thing to do.

Is there a way to take a detour before this scenario becomes inevitable? There is. It starts with each of us insisting that what is ours is really ours, and refusing to accept the accusation of selfishness for so insisting. It involves placing the highest priority on common sense, so that we don’t accept intrusions into modern and perfectly harmless ways of conducting our lives. It entails a willingness to look at why the wisdom of the ages, such as sacred Scripture, has been considered as such.

If you want to feel a sense of urgency about something, feel it about the slip that humanity has made from its peak. Think about how dulled so many spirits have become. Insist on your nobility as a member of a species distinguished by having a soul.

Mean what you say and insist that words you hear in conversation have real meaning.

This is how we’ll rescue our civilization.

It’s doable, but it’s very, very late in the day.