Get your own Free Home PageDisasters, such as the tornadoes that killed more than three dozen people here and the floods and mudslides in California, always do two things. They shatter our illusion of being in control. They remind us how fundamentally decent most Americans are.
Disaster is just a name we apply to a cluster of individual tragedies when they occur together in a short period of time. We look at the widespread damage. The politicians fly in for their photo opportunity and fly out. We in the news media turn it into a big event and usually name it. But it is, finally, not an event but a congregation of individual tragedies.
I knew only one of the people killed by the tornadoes. Tom Tipton had taught an economics course at Seminole Community College when I took it at night some years ago. He was one of those genuinely great teachers and fine human beings you remember long after you forget the subject he taught. I was saddened to hear of his death, but I would have been no matter how he died. It is the loss that wounds, not the manner of it.
Nothing a politician can say or a journalist can write can soften the pain of losing a loved one. And next to family, the most precious possession most people have is their home because it is so intimately linked to family. To lose a home cuts worse than losing a business. Insurance checks or government loans cannot restore the memories and the associations that are lost. The new house will never be the old home.
But, like it or not, disasters are part of the human condition. I suppose because God is interested in our souls, not our bodies, he didn't make us out of armor. He made us vulnerable not only to trauma, natural or otherwise, but to bugs big and small, radiation and other assorted hazards. Just to be born is to embark on a hazardous journey, and human beings are, if nothing else, courageous.
We should be glad, however, to be reminded now and then that we are not in control.
Some people like to romanticize Nature and to personify it, but nature is impersonal and indifferent. If the faults shift, if the volcano erupts, if the tornado or hurricane develop, there is nothing we can do to stop them. We survive by adapting because nature will not adapt to us, and sometimes that means just running and ducking.
It's easy to buy into the great illusion of power and control when things are going smoothly and we are shuffling papers in our temperature-controlled offices.
But let a tornado come along and toss a tractor-trailer rig around like a rag doll, and we are reminded of how powerless we really are.
The Earth is still here; lots of empires, civilizations and hot-shot humans aren't.
The lesson is to shun arrogance and to greet every sunrise with a grateful heart.
And the other lesson is to watch what happens as soon as the storm passes. Decent and compassionate people pour out to help those in need without regard for race, ethnicity or religion.
The generosity that is always demonstrated when disasters strike is truly astounding and inspiring.
Whenever we get down on the world and start to succumb to that seductress, cynicism, just remember all those people who crawl into the wreckage, who bring food and drink and blankets, who dig through the rubble, who do anything they can to help people they don't even know.
Hey, a country with folks that good and decent can't have too bad a future.
Multiculturalism is a term much abused these days. It is used by some as an excuse to express their hatred for those ``dead, white, male Europeans.'' It is used by others as a sort of cover for affirmative action or runaway immigration.
But make no mistake, the cultural heritage of America that sets this country apart from all others is Anglo-Celtic.
People seem to forget that for 169 years our ancestors were British citizens, loyal subjects of His Majesty, the King. They were governed by English law, and their political thinking was English. And it was from those 13 British colonies that the country we call America evolved.
The fact that at the same time there were French trappers and priests and scattered Spanish soldiers and padres in the part of the continent claimed by France and Spain has nothing to do with the 13 Colonies.
In 1790, 78 percent of the population was English, Scotch-Irish and Scotch. Another 11 percent were Dutch and German, who are ethnically related to the English. The other 11 percent were Africans who by their enslavement were denied a role in the development of the country's culture at that time.
It was Anglo-Celtic people who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our political heritage, our ideas about individual liberty, are derived from English history and thinking. You can see the similarities between the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, and our Constitution was pretty much the unwritten English Constitution in writing.
Unlike the multiculturalists, I'm not playing the put-down game. I'm merely asserting that, because our political institutions came from England, our children cannot understand the American Revolution without also learning a lot about the British Isles.
For reasons of their own, neither Spain nor France sent great numbers of people to North America, and, for that reason, it was relatively easy for the British, and later the Americans, to seize the large but largely unoccupied territories claimed by those two European powers.
But that's why the culture of Colonial America and the early republic from 1787 to 1860 was primarily English. Today that is changing because of the massive immigration that began after 1860 and has accelerated since the 1960s.
One British author recently described American culture as Jewish and black, alluding to the great success American Jews have had in the arts-and-entertainment business. Who knows? In the future, the culture may be Chinese or Indian.
But one should not confuse the present with the past. The 20th-century American did not fight the Revolution, did not develop our political institutions. To know the roots of America, you have to face the fact that those roots are Anglo-Celtic with some input from French and Italian political thinkers.
And although I don't subscribe to the idea that one culture is superior to another, I don't hesitate to say that I prefer my own Anglo-Celtic culture to any other. I would assume that people from other cultures feel the same way about theirs. I prefer our legal system, which evolved from English common law. I like the emphasis on individual liberty and rights. I think that the English speakers have been more successful in keeping their governments democratic than most other folks have.
There is much to admire in other cultures, but true tolerance involves recognizing differences and respecting those differences. Too many people today want to play the game of bad-mouth the Anglo-Celtic or you're a bigot. I won't be blackmailed. Spit on my ancestors' grave and you and I will have a serious disagreement.
Now that the Iraqi crisis is temporarily back in its sputter phase, Americans ought to think seriously about foreign policy. You might as well put in your 2-cents worth because you pay for it with your taxes and blood.
Since World War I there has developed in the United States a foreign-policy establishment made up of such outifts as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderburg Group and various foundations and think tanks.
The theory behind this -- and it originated in England -- is that common folk are too ignorant to deal with foreign policy, so such matters should be handled by an elite. And because in democracies there is a turnover in government, this foreign-policy elite should be anchored in the private sector so it can provide continuity.
There might be something to be said for this if the elite were an elite based on merit rather than inheritance, marriage, money and sycophancy. But, alas, 20th century history has shown that the elite are about as dumb as anyone else when it comes to making blunders and mistakes. They also have this nasty habit of assuming that whatever is in their personal financial interest is, by golly, what a coincidence, in the national interest.
The story of this foreign-policy establishment is told, by the way, in Tragedy and Hope, a massive history of the 20th century written by Bill Clinton's favorite professor, the late Dr. Carroll Quigley. If you don't want to read all 1,300 or so pages, he summarizes it starting on page 950.
It's because so much of American foreign policy is driven by hidden agendas that so often the publicly stated reasons just don't make sense. It never made sense, for example, to fight communism in Vietnam while protecting communism in Cuba and trading with communism in Eastern Europe. It never made sense to spend trillions of dollars to defend ourselves against the Soviet Union while American and European bankers were lending billions of dollars to the Soviet Union. Nor does it make sense to pretend that a dictator of a down-and-out Third World country is a threat to world peace.
A policy must always have an objective, and our government's policies should have objectives that benefit Americans, not someone else. It would be stupid for the American government to adopt a policy of increasing the sale of French wines in the United States, but our government has done quite similarly stupid things.
Foreign countries in debt to American banks can't pay unless they export, so the big-money bankers have been more than willing to sacrifice American jobs to foreign imports so they can get their interest on their foreign loans paid.
George Washington long ago set out a sensible foreign policy: friendship and commerce with all nations but no entangling political or military alliances. Don't mix in other people's quarrels, Washington warned us. And treat all nations equally, neither punishing some nor rewarding others. He warned most strenuously against foreign influences in our domestic affairs and politics.
Well, needless to say, the foreign-policy elite follow the exact opposite of Washington's advice. We're in entangling alliances up the gazoo and sticking our nose into every quarrel, tribal or ethnic, from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean.
We are notoriously inconsistent in how we treat different countries, and, of course, some of the most powerful lobbies in America represent foreign governments and businesses.
I think that, based on the record of the 20th century, which is largely a record of wars, economic calamities and political murder on a mass scale, the common folk of America ought to fire the foreign-policy elite and do the job themselves. Couldn't do worse, that's for sure.
American politicians these days often want to do things they shouldn't do and not do things they should do.
Case in point, drunken driving and immigration.
Congress and the president want to blackmail the states into adopting a lower blood-alcohol level as a definition of being too drunk to drive. The bill states that if states do not adopt a lower level, they will lose part of their transportation money.
The fact that Congress has to resort to blackmailing the states with their own money demonstrates that it knows that the federal government has no legitimate authority to define drunken driving. Indeed, it does not. Nowhere in the Constitution -- the sole source of federal power -- is there any language that could be remotely construed as giving Congress any authority to legislate in essentially local matters.
It is disgusting to see the contempt politicians in both parties have for the Constitution.
On the other hand, Congress does have the duty and responsibility to control immigration, but, here, it refuses to do so. It has sat by while the Clinton administration has corrupted the immigration service. It has refused to put its money where its mouth is in controlling illegal immigration. And it has refused to set lower limits on legal immigration. It even undid most of the so-called reforms it had passed the year before.
We suffer a lot of bad government because of this disregard of the Constitution. It is really a pragmatic document that divided the labor of government between the states and the federal government. The federal government, as the agent, would handle matters that affected all the states, such as the common defense, foreign policy and foreign trade.
No one would want to see 50 foreign policies and 50 different sets of trade laws. The Constitution intended for the federal government to handle only housekeeping chores domestically -- such as building post roads, setting a common standard for weights and measures, creating a common currency and ensuring that we have an internal free market.
Makes a lot of sense. The bulk of governing -- 95 percent, said James Madison -- would continue to be done by the states. That, too, makes sense. Governments closer to the people are easier for the people to control. State governments are also closer and more knowledgeable about problems in their own states.
But instead of the sensible constitutional government, we have, in fact, a European-style central government that presumes to legislate every aspect of everyone's life and to render the states as impotent subdivisions of the federal giant.
This, of course, is impractical. It concentrates too much power into the hands of 546 individuals (100 senators, 435 members of the House of Representatives, one president, one vice president and nine Supreme Court justices). This invites corruption. The government is far removed from the people and difficult for the people to control.
The only people in America today who have true self-government are those who can afford to buy it. The rest of us are left with a choice of one of two gangs of rich guys, which have candidates fronting for them.
Politicians like to keep people's minds focused on issues -- such as the definition of drunken driving -- but people should pay attention to principles and to structure of government.
We need to restore the original constitutional republic. Centralized governments don't work and always evolve into authoritarian or totalitarian governments. America prospered as a republic of republics. As a central government, America has become imperialistic and involved in one war after another.
A recent column about Abraham Lincoln produced some interesting responses that might be useful to think about.
One man accused me of ``attacking'' Lincoln. As it happens, I did not express any opinion of my own about Lincoln in that column; I merely quoted Lincoln's contemporaries.
Another man, highly miffed by a quoted description of Lincoln by his personal secretary, suggested that I read a biography of Lincoln written by a Harvard professor.
Now, come on folks. Who knows more about Lincoln -- his personal secretary who was with him on a daily basis for nearly six years or a 20th-century biographer who never laid eyes on Lincoln or on anyone who had? That sort of shows you how some folks prefer comfortable fiction to unpleasant truth.
Historians and biographers are just highfalutin journalists. Leaving aside divine revelation, there are only four sources of information that are available to anyone. One source is personal observation, which is not available if you are seeking information about the past. Another source is eyewitnesses who saw the event or knew the person you are writing about. Another source is the written record -- letters, diaries, books published by contemporaries, government records, etc. The fourth source is physical evidence -- clothes, pots, weapons, etc.
Historians and biographers are storytellers, and, like journalists, they can, if they wish, selectively choose their facts to tell the story they want to tell without regard for the truth.
So you should keep in mind that when you read a biography or a history, you are reading something that is not necessarily the truth. You're reading the author's version of the truth, which may or may not conform to reality. One witty fellow has observed that God himself cannot rewrite history but that historians do it all the time.
In short, the reality of the past cannot be changed, but accounts of it can be changed like fishing lures.
What I was really trying to do with that Lincoln column was to point out the value of reading works by people who lived the events as opposed to works written by men many decades later. Many of the books published in the 19th century are being republished in new editions today. One such publisher is Liberty Fund in Indianapolis. You can find an extensive list of publishers and dealers on the League of the South's Web site -- http://www.dixienet.org
You can also find the originals in secondhand bookstores or in good libraries. To me, reading the words of people who were actually present at the events they are describing adds to the excitement of learning. My interests are the South and the West.
You don't have to take the slant of some 20th-century professor on the causes of the War Between the States. You can read the words of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, in The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, or the words of his vice president, Alexander Stephens, in his two-volume account of the constitutional causes of the war.
More recently I read John Wesley Powell's account of his trip through the Grand Canyon.
Much of academia in America in the postwar era has gone putrid. In fact, the last outpost of Marxism in the world today is the American university campus. There are relatively few genuine scholars around these days and the word of most academics is no good.
So take your history straight -- from the people who lived it and you'll be more likely to get an accurate reading of the reality.
President Clinton gave me a good laugh recently when he accused Saddam Hussein of resorting to ``lies, stonewalling and deception.'' Must have been a Freudian slip for Clinton to choose the three words that most aptly describe him and his administration.
Hussein may not win the Mr. Nice Guy award, but he has been more forthcoming about his missiles than Clinton has about his recreational activities. I would sooner believe Hussein when he says he has no weapons of mass destruction than I would believe Clinton when he says he has had no sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
If that were true, I don't why Ms. Lewinsky would refer to our president in terms referring to a less-than-standard form of sex. I bet you none of Hussein's interns have ever said that about him.
A good example of Clinton's lies and deception in another field is his state of the union address. Remember, he said the federal budget will have a surplus and that surplus must be put aside to save Social Security.
That is both a lie and a deception. The only reason he can purport to have a surplus is because he is using the surplus in the Social Security fund. So he is lying when he says the budget is balanced. And he is engaging in deception when he says $8 billion must be set aside to save Social Security, which wouldn't need saving if he and Congress had not spent all the Social Security surplus.
Don't take my word for it. The American Academy of Actuaries has said that if Social Security were separated from the federal budget, instead of a surplus, the 1999 budget would show a deficit of $100 billion.
Ron Gebhardtsbauer, the academy's senior pension fellow, put it this way: ``It is important for the American public to know that Social Security surpluses are being used to offset the deficit. Calling the federal budget balanced now is like a family using its 40l(k) investment to offset its credit-card debt.''
Ye olde smoke and mirrors, a common trick on the banks of the Potomac, where the truth is treated like a leper -- isolated from public view and only rarely allowed out.
Other examples? The Clintons assert that they have no idea how 900 Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Republicans ended up in the White House basement. When the billing records of Hillary Clinton's old law firm were subpoenaed, they couldn't find them for two years. Then, when they did find them, they were sitting in plain sight in a residency part of the White House. The Clintons couldn't explain how they got there, where they had been or who had put them on the table.
Compared with the Clintons, Hussein is a pillar of veracity. He kills people, but he doesn't lie about it.
Before the Gulf War, Hussein released to the United States the transcript of a meeting between him and the U.S. ambassador in which the ambassador said to Hussein in relationship to his quarrel with Kuwait, ``... the U.S. has no interest in intra-Arab quarrels.'' To this day, the U.S. government has refused to release to the public the ambassador's cabled report of that meeting. Odd, isn't it, when a dictator shares more information with the American public than the American government.
Sen. Bob Kerry, D-Nebraska, said publicly that Clinton is an extremely good liar. He truly is. Having no conscience, Clinton could fool a lie detector because he feels nothing when telling whoppers. Poor Richard Nixon was a poor liar. When he lied, his upper lip would sweat like a center for the National Basketball Association.
When it comes to lying, stonewalling and deceiving, the Clintons are world class. Hussein is not even in their league.
As another reminder of the moral bankruptcy of the federal government, please note that most federal aid to Americans struck by natural disasters is in the form of loans. Most foreign aid is a gift.
If someone can think of any rational justification for this, please let me know because I can't think of one.
Congress taxes Americans. When these taxpayers are wiped out by a tornado or flood, the politicians rush down to get their pictures taken and prove themselves to be great philanthropists. Don't worry, they say. Help is on the way.
Yes, it is. These wiped-out taxpayers now have the privilege of borrowing at interest their own money from their own government.
But when the lobbyists for foreign countries come around -- and there seems to be more lobbyists for foreigners than for Americans -- then Congress simply writes them a check. Hey, you don't have to pay it back. You don't even have to be grateful, they say.
Foreign aid is, of course, unconstitutional. There is no wording in the Constitution that even a shyster lawyer could construe as authorizing the federal government to tax Americans and give their money to foreign governments.
But if you still think that we have a constitutional government in this country, you probably think that Bill Clinton plans to take the vows and enter a monastery when he finishes his second term.
It's really the fault of Americans. Every year Congress quietly rolls through the foreign-aid appropriation and authorization bills. A handful of good people in the House of Representatives and fewer in the Senate vote against it. But the American people, year in and year out, chew their cud and roll their eyes or blandly accept the canned responses from the politicians.
The old mantras of ``it's in our national interest'' or ``it's a matter of national security'' are recited. Sometimes the apologists will say, ``Well, they (the foreign governments) will spend most of it with us.''
Remember the joke when Tonto told the Lone Ranger, "What is this 'us' business, white man?"
I don't know about you, but I am not in the business of selling tanks, land mines, mortars, fighter-bombers, missiles and other such goodies. I am not in the business of training foreign soldiers and secret police or of supplying dictators with advanced computers so they can better spy on their citizens.
But even if you are in those businesses, it is not the business of Congress to tax Americans in order to supply your customers with the money to buy your weapons. If you can't find a dictator with his own money, tough beans.
However, as long as the American people remain apathetic, they will never have a government that serves their interests.
Many Americans seem to prefer socialism to liberty, but, even for those, I have bad news. What you are getting is not socialism but a form of corporate fascism.
To put it in class terms, the game being played is tax the middle class to finance welfare to keep the lower class quiet while providing the main benefits to the upper class. When the middle class finally shrinks to nothing, force will be substituted for welfare as the means of control.
Don't mean to sound gloomy, folks, but the awful truth is that if citizens don't control their government, the government will control them.
Things will not ``just work out.'' The tendency of all governments is to increase their power at the expense of liberty.
What the revolution gave us was the opportunity to govern ourselves. But if we don't, then you can bet your bippy somebody will govern us to benefit themselves at our expense.
Active citizen or victim? Take your choice.
Get your own Free Home Page