sisu

One person's assimilation is another's appropriation

"Indigenous leaders from across the world requested that the UN outlaw cultural appropriation." Elizabeth Warren aka Fauxcahontas was unavailable for comment.

"Mosaicist vs assimilationist: On the multiculti side, there were smug, self-congratulatory sermons scolding melting-pot types like ourselves for xenophobic/racist views we do not hold," we blogged back in February of 2014, quoting a holier-than-thou Daily Beast opinionator:

At this point, we shouldn’t be shocked by the intolerance of some towards immigrants and other cultures. 

As our Shakesperaean actress sis always says, nothing changes but the date. In the wake of the latest iterations of the national "debate," we've narrowed the question down to fewer than 140 characters:

One person's #Assimilation is another's #Appropriation. Discuss

— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) June 17, 2017

That appropriation bit is but the latest iteration of the Gramscian March through the institutions, and Sara Hoyt has been on the case forever. This from her November 2015 "Prepare to be Assimilated":

Humans are tribal, and living in a multi-ethnic society doesn’t make you less tribal. This is why people keep looking for racists under their bed, because you know, it’s baked in.

And from just the other day:

The problem is the left has bought into Marxism and its pseudo-scientific lies. And the system despite many past failures to predict anything, purports to predict our emergence into a paradisaical “perfect communist state”. Everything, from leftist “science” to leftist “art” (that is to say the establishment versions of those, since our establishment is solid left) is designed to hasten the coming of that ah, eschatological result. According to Marxist/leftist/progressive exegesis, of course.

Because their minds were not trained in flexibility and they’re something of a cult, they are having a nervous breakdown.

In cults, this usually ends up in koolaid. In nations, too, when a paradigm (yes, sorry, but it’s the right word) breaks in a way perceived as sudden.

As we blogged back in February of 2005 in our post "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open":

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature. The long-repressed voices of opposition in a free society, now ringing loud and clear through talk radio, cable TV and -- of course -- the blogosphere, will force the left to rethink its arguments or go extinct.

Chuck Todd "didn't like having Mozart associated with the Nazis"

"Let me, let me free-ee-eeze again to death." 17th-century British composer Henry Purcell's rending-of-garments "The Cold Scene" from "King Arthur" energizes dancers' evocative kinetics (above) expressing the storming of the beaches of Normandy during controversial D-Day70 commemoration presentation yesterday at Sword Beach, Normandy.

"I knew it was Mozart. Didn't like having Mozart associated with the Nazis," MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd protested to us this morning on Twitter in response to our critique of his reportage of the much-panned "interpretive dance" presented at Friday's D-Day70 observation at Sword Beach, Normandy. Counter to the narrative spin of every commenter we've seen out here, we were alone in finding something profound and revelatory in the live multi-media creation that interwove horrific historical film images of Nazi Germany and WWII with minimalist dancing and profoundly moving passages of Mozart, Beethoven ("Eroica" & "Ode to Joy"), Purcell and others to express the war between good and evil that is the human condition. More on our take in a moment, but first our twitter tussle with Todd: 

.@ChuckTodd bloodless blurb #DDay70 dance: “Some German music 2 sort of talk about rise of Germany.” What I heard: Transcendant MOZART et al

— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) June 7, 2014

Thx 4 reply @chucktodd! I think artistic pt was contrast betw Nazi inhumanity vs Mozart humanity. Also, German vs Austrian controversial :)

— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) June 7, 2014

We happened to watch the "interpretive dance" live yesterday on C-Span 2, unfiltered, unlike almost everybody else, whose opinions seemed to echo Chuck Todd's. The estimable Rick Moran's assessment was typical:

It is the weirdest, most incongruous, most disrespectful performance one can imagine.

Old blogfriend Fausta, who learned about it later in the day, compared the interpretive dance devastatingly to Mel Brooks's masterful "Springtime for Hitler," and the widely linked Mediaite put it this way in "D-Day Interpretive Dance Caps Off Month of Disrespect for Vets":

We commemorated the sacrifice of tens of thousands with a belittling dance.

Had anyone actually WATCHED the thing? Or had most taken the assessment of thought leaders like Chuck Todd and run with it? May we suggest that what we have here might be an instance of Schopenhauer's informational cascades?

Todd, who appeared to be reading his comments about the "German music to sort of talk about the rise of Germany," admitted he hadn't even seen the performance, which ran along in split screen as he and others offered commentary. Why bother to watch a performance when you can rely upon the narrative of someone else who hasn't seen it?

There's diversity at Harvard?

"Cello," part of "Chamber Orchestra" series of concert-instrument interiors by Studio Mierswa-Kluska, featured in the Boston Society of Architects' Architecture Boston.

"There's diversity at Harvard? Where are the conservatives?" asks a skeptical bflat879 in the comments of Harvard graduating economics concentrator Shreya Maheshwari's myopic Harvard Crimson essay "The Social News Network," a touchingly naive take on the narratives that be:   

It’s great to use Facebook to filter through our personal and commercial interests. But when this filter extends to our intellectual life, it can trap us in an online echo chamber by gradually minimizing our interaction with opposing thoughts and cutting off our engagement with the broader world …

Even students at Harvard, with all its emphasis on diversity, aren’t immune to default social and intellectual collusion."

EVEN students at Harvard? Emphasis on diversity? If you want diversity, see Senator Scott Brown challenger, Harvard Law School's "first woman of color," lily-white Elizabeth Warren (0% Cherokee, 100% Bullshit). Who needs Maheshwari's "online echo chamber" when you've got the politically correct mindset of academia itself? Michael Barone explains in "Life in a cocoon dulls political responses":

But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

We've been there forever, of course. As we wrote a few years back in "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'":

Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready.  Enter the bloggers, stage right.  As paleontologist Dr. Vermeij might say, "It isn't going to be pretty." Googling the good doctor, we were thrilled to see his field studies of animal evolution had led him to very much the same place Thomas Sowell has come to in his studies of economics …

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature. The long-repressed voices of opposition in a free society, now ringing loud and clear through talk radio, cable TV and — of course — the blogosphere, will force the left to rethink its arguments or go extinct.

Update: Doug Ross is on the same wavelength:

Old media is literally committing suicide in front of our very eyes. In its desperate rush to see Barack Obama reelected, they are ignoring bigger and bigger stories. People have the Internet. They read The Drudge Report. They listen to talk radio. They read blogs. And in spite of all of these different access points, old media is ignoring blockbuster story after blockbuster story.

Update II: Heh. Instalanche! Thank you, Professor Reynolds.

Update III: Doug Ross links.

Crossposted at Riehl World View.

Occupy Wall Street: What rough beast?

"The Occupy Wall Street movement is growing, and lots of activity is taking place in social media," writes Social Media Research Foundation Director Marc Smith of Connected Action, who generated the "NodeXL SNA Twitter Map" above tracing the connections among people who tweeted the term “#occupywallstreet yesterday. Click here for larger image.

"DUMB MOBS," we tossed into the twitterflood of #occupywallstreet commentary this morning as Mark Steyn's "pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world" slouched inchoately towards a public square near you, even as "progressive" opportunists seeking to distance themselves from their own crony-capitalist corruption were scrambling to align themselves with the delusional "99%." Howie Carr said it best:

The fact that the national Democrats are trying to throw in with these layabouts tells you all you need to know about both groups …

In a few months, we’ve gone from grassroots to George Soros astroturf. From Arab Spring to Irish Spring.

Smith's "Node XL SNA Twitter Map" brought to mind this image from an earlier post comparing the flocking behavior of Darwin's Starlings on Otmoor to the behaviors of humans signaling each other on Twitter: "Individuals, but moving in a single entity. And the reason for this behavior? Well, thousands of eyes looking for predators on the roost site. Nothing could escape their gaze, no raptor could surprise this soaring mass of bird flesh … The birds are also maneuvering for position, social position."

We were intrigued with the elegance and suggestiveness of "sociologist of computer-mediated collective action" Marc Smith's visualization (top) of who was twittering whom yesterday on the topic de jour. We were unsurprised to see the likes of MSNBC harpie Rachel Maddow (nearly 2 million followers) and Soros sucklings Media Matters (40 thousand plus) amongst the "top most between users," but it wasn't only the well funded who were able to wield influence. The map was "scaled by numbers of followers," our side of the aisle was having a lark shining the light of truth, justice and the American way on #occupywallstreet's "faux poos," and there was Big Journalism's own diggrbiii (7 thousand plus followers) among the top 10. Quality, not quantity?

We're hard-wired to read into things, to divine patterns that may at some level, at some moment of danger, be key to our survival. The analogy of smart-crowd twittering with coordinated starling swooping seems obvious, but what else?  A human fetus, perhaps? Take another look. The foreboding of Yeats's "The Second Coming" comes to mind: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …"

'Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you," John Adams wrote Abigail in 1800 in a much-quoted letter that resonates in this time of turmoil: 

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

"The Littler 99%" posted by Dan of criticalmass and twittered with the hashtag #OccupySesameStreet. Compare little girl's wish list with actual "demands" posted by Occupy Wall Street bottom Mom's basement dwellers. 

Having failed to study history, the great grandsons of great grandsons of our Founding Fathers have become Mark Steyn's "zombie youth 'occupying' Wall Street … contemptuous of the world that sustains their comforts."

Update: Cool. Link at New York Times Business Day's Twitter article.

Update II: Maggie's links. Thanks, Bird Dog!

Crossposted at Riehl World View.

"Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism"

We loved twitter friend Dan Collins of POWIP AKA vermontaigne's disagreement with tahDeetz's assertion [above] re Leftists. "I disagree with the 'sane' thing." Exactly. As we twittered back, "To say 'keep sane' implies they ever WERE sane." But speaking of driving leftists over the edge, tahDeetz was spot on with this: Metaphorically WaterBoard your "favorite" Leftist. Make them read this.

"Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism," twittered tahDeetz this afternoon. We'd sent her a link to one of our uber posts from way back in February of 2005, "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open." Take THAT, you leftists claiming to own Darwin even as your core collectivist beliefs fly in the face of the economic logic of nature and human nature that underlies Darwin's theory of natural selection. A few excerpts from our original post:

February 2005 caption: A "snail link" — an article from the NYT Science Times that caught our politico-philosopho-scientific eye ten years ago.  Not having the option of URL linking in those pioneering days, this protoblogger clipped the thing, underlined important passages, sent xeroxed copies to our small circle of interested parties and then carefully filed it away in a drawer, from which we were able to pull it this afternoon after all these years.

From our February 2005 post "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open":

"Meanwhile, the fossil record showed crabs, fish and others who would dine on these shelled delicacies diversifying and becoming better at cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open," goes the snail link from February 7, 1995, referred to in our last post. For ten years this brilliant/crackpot explanation has been festering in our brain. We're talking here about what went wrong with the Democrats, not to mention their leftist allies in academia, the MSM and the larger world of international progressivists.

… leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready. Enter the bloggers, stage right. As paleontologist Dr. Vermeij might say, "It isn't going to be pretty." Googling the good doctor, we were thrilled to see his field studies of animal evolution had led him to very much the same place Thomas Sowell has come to in his studies of economics.

It took a little longer than we'd thought it would for what turned out to be the Tea Party movement of constitutional conservatism to emerge and start reigniting the lights of the Shining City, but our words back then are standing up pretty well given the reverberations of the Revolution of 2010.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Leadership: Sarah Palin's rousing invocation to a grieving nation

"Public discourse and debate isn't a sign of crisis but of our enduring strength. It is part of why America is exceptional," Sarah Palin tells the nation in "America's Enduring Strength" on Facebook and Vimeo. Read full transcript here and watch/listen here.

"It is time to restore the precept that each of us is responsible for our actions," Sarah Palin cuts through the ersatz outrage of the vitriolic "character assassins, partisans, liars and propagandists," in John Nolte's words, who have been "doing everything in their power to bring down the right" in the wake of the Tucson massacre. Listen to Sarah's rousing invocation here. Once again she disintermediates the moribund powers that be to speak directly to the American people with her vision of the Shining City, based upon what Thomas Sowell calls the "constrained vision" of human nature. Here's Sarah:

Our Founders' genius was to design a system that helps settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure …

Public discourse and debate isn't a sign of crisis but of our enduring strength. It is part of why America is exceptional.

No one should be deterred from speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent. And we certainly must not be deterred by those who embrace evil and call it good. And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion. and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.

Following the life lesson her father taught her — "Don't retreat, reload" — she doesn't let those character assassins get away with metaphorical murder:

Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election. 

"But frustration makes you stupid and the left is frustrated, especially those in the media, because they are losing," John Nolte explains:

And other than embarrassing ratings and cratering circulation numbers, nothing points to their diminishing power more than Sarah Palin’s ascendancy as a bona fide political force in this country. Whether or not the former Alaskan Governor becomes president isn’t an issue. She’s already changed the face of electoral politics and even managed to gain a serious foothold on the beach of popular culture while doing so.

Update: We like twitterfriend Daniel Morgan's take:

She totally nailed what needed to be said and is the shadow president!

Update II: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update III: Sarah's address is top story on Memeorandum.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Barney Frank: "It's an air kiss they're blowing to the Tea Party"

"Bill Whittle, you may have put the nation on the road to recovery of the Founders' enlightened vision of freedom singlehandedly," we wrote in the caption to our post "A Declaration of Independence: Art for freedom's sake" last March: "Longhandedly, that is, as in writing out the Declaration of Independence longhand. We've completed the first part (three 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, above) and found the exercise a revelation."

"It's an air kiss they're blowing to the tea party," Barney Frank dismisses the House Republican majority's "new rule requiring members to cite the specific constitutional authority for any bill they introduce." The lower chamber's first order of business on Thursday, one day after Speaker-designate John Boehner is sworn in, will be a reading aloud of the Constitution, a shock to the system of those like Frank who have lost sight of the Shining City through the fog of their willful misreading of the Founders' intent. Jonah Goldberg explains Barney's Complaint in a must-read little masterpiece of the essayist's art that plays with progressives' eleutherophobia:

According to many commentators, Speaker-to-Be John Boehner and his crew of zealots have some very scary ideas. Chief among them: They want to make some obscure, inscrutable tract from an ancient civilization the centerpiece of their legislative philosophy. Indeed, in a move generating consternation and exasperation at MSNBC and other bastions of right-thinking, these cultists will read their perversely sacred text at the opening of the legislative session, breaking with more than 200 years of precedent.

For historical perspective, Jonah in USA Today, Cato's Roger Pilon in the WSJ and Thomas Sowell in the Union Leader are all on the same wavelength. Here's Sowell:

During the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, the denigration of the Constitution began, led by such luminaries as Princeton scholar and future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, future Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

As a professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson wrote condescendingly of "the simple days of 1787" when the Constitution was written and how, in our presumably more complex times, "each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day …

As Roscoe Pound put it, law should be "in the hands of a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public." That is still the vision of the left a hundred years later. The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution, by voting out those who promote end runs around it.

"The annoying thing is they used to be honest about this," observes Jonah:

Woodrow Wilson openly expressed his contempt for fidelity to the Constitution, preferring a "living" Constitution that social planners can rewrite at a glance to fit the changing times.

But in recent years, liberals have retreated from admitting that the Constitution is inconvenient to arguing that it is either simply irrelevant or infinitely malleable. [Enter Ezra Klein, stage left.]

Beyond the disinguousness of their sales pitch, the problem with the liberal/progressive project has always been their utopian denial of life's dark side in ourselves, the tragic view of human nature that we are forever flogging here. It was Bill Whittle — the fearless freedom fighter whose "Imperishable" inspired us all to write out in longhand and whisper out loud the words of the Declaration last winter (see caption above) — who said it best in "The Iceberg" last summer. A few excerpts:

But Progressivism is not progressive – it’s ancient. Cyclical. It’s circular. It is, in fact, the symptom and the eventual cause of impending collapse.

In fact, in all of human history, there has been only one genuinely progressive, genuinely liberating idea: a lightning bolt across the pages of history – the why in 1776, the how in 1787 – the idea of limited government, god-given rights, personal liberty and rule by the vast collective wisdom and industry of the common man, and not by the bored, pampered and self-hating elites that have run everything before and since. This is a once-in-history idea. This is why we have to conserve it. We have to conserve this fundamentally liberal idea.

As Scott Ott wrote in his defense of Sarah Palin's "death panels" two summers back:

Journalism professionals would also benefit from reading some American history, including our founding documents. Our founders had a deep understanding of human nature, shaped by their lifelong, exhaustive study of history and philosophy and of the book that best encapsulates both — the Bible.

Update: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

The Social Network: Deconstructing "centuries' worth of privilege and access"

"Fading in from black, an ethereal female chorus sings 'I don't care if it hurts/I want to have control/Iwant a perfect body/Iwant a perfect soul/I want you to notice/When I'm not around … I don't belong here,' building intensity alongside a haunting solo piano" in the trailer to "The Social Network." We haven't seen it yet (tomorrow!), but already it occupies our perfect body and our perfect soul. It resonates with the ur theme of our blog, the importance of being noticed by the other members of the tribe: Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the trailer: "I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs."

"It's about the ability of a new media class to deconstruct centuries' worth of privilege and access that would've won in every other generation but now," writes Frank Chi at HuffPo, reviewing the movie that's the talk of the "sphere." First a bit about TSN itself, and then a bit of analysis. Now playing at a theater near you, David Fincher's "lightning-fast dramatization of the disputatious founding of Facebook" is "a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can’t get online)," writes Joshua Rothkopf at TimeOut New York:

… sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect. Forget about damage control — if I were billionaire site exec Mark Zuckerberg, I’d be down on my knees in gratitude for an origin story this brainy, suggestive and, yes, flattering. Sort of … 

The Social Network zings along like nothing attempted since the heady days of Paddy Chayefsky. (We might be looking at the heir to his darkly dazzling Network.)

An heir to Chayefsky's "darkly dazzling Network," indeed. It's in the air. This from Dan, who's been pounding the idea forever, often to deaf ears in the upper reaches of the GOP:

Thanks in large part to new media, politics as usual will not continue to be usual in the future … The system is broken, and it needs to be broken up.

As usual, Glenn Harlan Reynolds is primi inter pares, from his cyberancient Army of Davids (2006) to his latest must-read Washington Examiner column, "Tea Party dominance was inevitable — and I told you so." He quotes a prescient April 15, 2009 column on the topic:

General disgust has drawn a lot of people off the sidelines and into the political arena …

This influx of new energy and new talent is likely to inject new life into small-government politics around the nation. The mainstream Republican Party still seems limp and disorganized. This grassroots effort may revitalize it. Or the tea-party movement may lead to a new third party that may replace the GOP, just as the GOP replaced the fractured and hapless Whigs.

"Really, that was only last year? Seems like it's been around for three years, anyway," says Tuck as we reminisce about our first Boston Tea Party on that same April day last year. Meanwhile, a clueless Thomas Friedman gets the "disgust" vs "rage" distinction but continues to be astounded:

I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: Trending on Memeorandum.

Update III: Instalanche!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

"The Big Lie that is the commentariat's narrative of the Obama presidency," revisited

Caption from our May 16, 2009 post "The Big Lie that is the commentariat's narrative of the Obama presidency": "Let everyone reject the destructive power of hatred and prejudice, which kills men's souls before it kills their bodies!" Pope Benedict told "tens of thousands of adoring followers in Jesus' childhood hometown" of Nazareth "with a message of reconciliation" Thursday.

Stumbling into live coverage of Pope Benedict  XVI's visit to the UK (Thank God!) early morning — He's at this very moment riding the Popemobile in the St. Ninian's Day Parade in Edinburgh — with the bright shining light of EWTV's Raymond Arroyo's commentary, we googled a couple of our dozens of "Pope blogging" posts and found this one (excerpted below) from May of 2009 that resonates:

May 16, 2009. “We cannot do whatever we please with the world,” Pope Benedict XVI told religious leaders of Galilee the other day (full remarks here) during the final leg of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land:

By moulding the hearts of the young, we mould the future of humanity itself.

And there's the rub, the tragic vs the utopian view of human nature that we're forever flogging here . Generations of young hearts have been stunted through the soul-deadening p.c. propaganda of the decades-long Gramscian march through the institutions.

The 18th-Century Pats believed, as John Adams wrote, that "Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom." But in the wake of the 20th-Century Gramscian march through the institutions, promulgated through the insidious propagandizing of future teachers by "critical pedagogy" proselytizers like President Obama's old pal Bill Ayers, all too many children of the 21st-Century — even some of the best and the brightest who sit on the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson — don't seem to understand the fragility of this thing that is their birthright. In Ben Franklin's words, oft quoted here, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

It’s a tragedy that President Obama’s lockstep legions haven't a clue about Papa Ratzi's "subtle yet nonetheless perceptible laws” of the universe. Rodney King's fatuous "Can't we all just get along?" comes to mind, as does Santayana's prescient "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." As military historian-cum-family-farmer Victor Davis Hanson — one who "remembers the past" better than almost anyone — wrote the other day:

The cracks … in Obama’s Pentelic statuary … will widen, because in about six areas he has taken on human nature itself, age-old logic and common-sense opponents that even a Harvard Law degree and Chicago organizing are no match for …

And a few final words from Benedetto himself in his South Lawn speech at the White House last year:

In reflecting on the spiritual victory of freedom over totalitarianism in his native Poland and in eastern Europe, [John Paul II] reminded us that history shows, time and again, that "in a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation," and a democracy without values can lose its very soul.

Amen.

Update: The Anchoress links in one of her deep, dark, delicious linkfests, all about Papa Ratzi's UK visit:

Sissy Willis is looking at the big picture from a religio-political perspective.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

A momentary flash of insight into that great abyss, the "progressive" mind

"I don't think you know it yet, but you have won," Glenn Beck tells viewers this afternoon, understandably gloating a bit at the collectivist navel-gazing left's continuing incomprehension of this "predominantly white" "Restoring America" thing that went off without a hitch — not a scrap of litter left behind for others to pick up — on Saturday (above). "They believe in the Liberation Theology of oppressor and victim. You don't. You don't have self-pity," he added. "The top GOP leaders in Washington need to prove that they are worthy of it. The Third Great Awakening is what it's all about, and you are living history."

"From within her effete elitist bubble Arianna Huffington preaches open-mindedness," we twittered awhile ago in a momentary flash of insight into that great abyss, the "progressive" mind. The words of Yale President Rick Levin's welcome speech to her daughter's class of incoming freshmen —  boilerplate to this tragic-view tea partier's tempered ears — had touched something deep within the dense utopian thicket of Mrs. Huffington's narrative-spinning apparatus, leading her to conflate Glenn Beck and President Obama in a grand unified theory about "the Hunger for Purpose in Times of Transition." Apparently unaware that "diversity" on campus is code for color of skin rather than content of character, she gushed:

Levin pointed out how the students "come from all 50 states and 58 nations" and urged them (and their parents) to go "entirely outside the range of your past experience," and "stretch yourself." "If the friends you make here are exclusively those who come from backgrounds just like your own and went to high schools just like your own," he said, "you will have forfeited half the value of a Yale education. Seek out friends with different histories and different interests; you will find that you learn the most from the people least like you."

As long as you toe the pc party line, of course. Diversity of world views need not apply. From there the HuffPo poobah-ette stumbled unwittingly into an embryonic if inchoate premonition of subsidiarian federalism:

"It's becoming clearer by the day that whatever 'good life' the country is going to have in the future, it's not going to be delivered by consumption — and, in the foreseeable future, it is unlikely to be delivered by Washington. The new "good life" will have to be "reasoned together" by all of us and forged together in our own communities and in our own families. As Obama said in 2006, "solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds."

That's where the rest of the country — Obama's "backwoods" tribes of bitter losers who "cling to guns or religion … as a way to explain their frustrations" — have been forever. You just weren't listening, Arianna & Company, including the Northeast Corridor fuddy-duddies of the establishment GOP, who still don't seem to get it. That's why it's a revelation for Arianna to have once been blind but now she sees:

"The challenge is to imagine a politics that takes moral and spiritual questions seriously," says Sandel, "but brings them to bear on broad economic and civic concerns, not only on sex and abortion." Justice, he writes, "is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things."

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.