Ted Nugent speaks on the Second Amendment.
He should just stop beating around the bush and tell us how he really feels about these things.
Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Ted Nugent speaks on the Second Amendment.
He should just stop beating around the bush and tell us how he really feels about these things.
(Hat tip: Gerard.)
Oh, we really do have the inmates running the asylum, don’t we. I thought you were supposed to be a constitutional perfesser or something, President Obama.
“You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.” — Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
This father had given his sons some truly cool-looking toy guns from his youth, and one day he and his family ventured down to the community pool bearing these arms. When all the liberals’ non-sex stereotyped, wearing-a-feminine-straightjacket sons saw these symbols of authentic boyhood, their eyes got wide; exclamations such as “wow” could be heard. This also has the very positive effect of confirming in deprived liberal children’s minds that their parents really are dorks. Oh, and you don’t have to worry about further alienating them from their (probably divorced, perhaps same-sex) parents/guardians. Unless liberal children can be reformed, they will push the old folks into a nursing home first chance they get no matter what you do.
I also should mention that you needn’t fear liberals’ self-righteous, didactic proclamations. Should they choose to say something to you, it only provides you the opportunity to put the icing on the cake. If, for instance, they say, “I’m really surprised you give your son toy guns to play with” just respond, “Well, let’s be realistic. He’s still a bit too young to have a real one.” This upsets liberals intensely.
Make sure a gun-grabbing goo-gooder you know & love, sees it. Today. Many times.
The print media leans hard-left. If you haven’t noticed this yet, you’ve been living in a cave. If you’ve gone through the motions of inspecting it and you have concluded something different, you are a shill; you have some kind of an agenda, personal or professional, and it has very little to do with the truth.
The talk-radio media leans hard-right. Attempts have been made to launch left-leaning talk-radio vehicles, and they’ve all either run aground or they’re headed there.
The liberal’s solution to the talk-radio-lean-right problem is the Fairness Doctrine. And no, it isn’t just something Sean Hannity screeches about to get people riled up. Fairly regularly, a prominent democrat politician will come out in favor of it, and the frequency of these utterances seems to be increasing under the tutelage of The Holy Administration. Clearly, they’re in a process of dipping their toes in the water and waiting for it to warm up.
The conservative’s solution to the print-media-lean-left problem, on the other hand, is a sigh and an eyeball-roll. This is in my file folder of evidence to offer to the “Dime” people who insist there isn’t a dime’s wortha difference between the parties: The Libertarian spirit is alive and well. At least, there’s a definite overtone of “That’s things the way they are, now do your best” in conservatism, even in what we in 2009 call “conservatism.” A distinction between playing the cards you’re dealt as best you can, and changing the rules of poker in the middle of a hand. It’s good to see.
Getting back to the liberal solution, though. It isn’t just the under-the-capitol-dome liberals who support the Fairness Doctrine. It’s man-in-the-street liberals too. And this is a difference between liberalism and conservatism that often goes undiscussed. Sort of our unofficial, “For Everybody” Fairness Doctrine: We don’t like to notice differences in the ways conservatives think versus the ways liberals think. It makes you look like an extremist. It’s not too hard to be accused of being an extremist, an agitator, someone who thinks about politics ALL THE TIME — for simply noticing these differences, pointing ’em out, and not doing a single other thing. Even if someone else was responsible for bringing up the overall subject on which you were commenting.
There are personal values and there are party values. Liberalism, I see, suffers from an erosion on the barrier that separates those two; they become one and the same.
“People should be required to present ID in a voting booth” is a party value, not a personal one. “No, they shouldn’t,” likewise, is a party value. We feel strongly about these things because obviously they can have an effect on the outcome of an election. That’s the definition: A party value is something that enhances, or diminishes, the likelihood of getting your candidates in charge of things. What’s an example of a personal value? “Abortion is murder”; and “Womens’ right to choose” (not sure if I’m supposed to be capitalizing Right To Choose.) You can win and win and win at those, and it won’t affect the determination of who has authority, and who doesn’t. Abortion has more of an effect on who gets to exist in the first place — not who wins an election. Personal values are things like: Slavery is bad. Things you’d be willing to invade a sovereign nation to enforce. Or, at least, give some serious consideration to doing that.
What we now call liberalism, seems to depend on those two realms melting together, blending in one with another. This is easily demonstrated by placing the liberal in a position in which he’s required to separate them. Try it sometime; so long as you aren’t putting a treasured friendship in jeopardy, it can be great entertainment, not unlike toying with a cat with a bit of yarn, or a laser pen. One of my personal favorites is “If I have an absolute right to vote and to have my vote counted, and women have an absolute right to control their bodies; if, through the unfortunate chaos that governs the cosmos, some mistaken referendum pops up on my ballot that would outlaw abortion forever, do I then have the absolute ‘right’ to vote yes on that?” If liberals made a distinction between party values and personal values, it would be a laughably simple conundrum for them. As it is, it’s like handing the imbecile the card that says “Turn this over and follow the instructions” on both sides. They’ll struggle and struggle, and not do too much to produce anything that could be termed a decisive intellectual triumph. Not even close.
In the case of not proving who you are when you go to vote, that mission masquerades under the sheeps’ clothing of a personal value: Poor people would be unfairly disenfranchised if we required identification. Well, that’s a big crock. The issue is that the democrat party depends on dead and non-existent people to win their elections. Down in Georgia, concession after concession after concession was made to the poor, poor, pitiful poor, so they wouldn’t have an aristocracy of people-with-drivers’-licenses, but the campaigns were organized nevertheless to have the new law voted down, and then slapped down in court. Last I read about it, they were still haggling it out.
When it comes to the Fairness Doctrine, the wall of separation between party values and personal values is chipped down into non-existence — because “The Public Owns The Airwaves.” What this is, is a holdover from the 1960’s, when it was uncool to crusade against communism; and, therefore, cool to defend it, and embrace at least the central underpinnings of it. Chief among those, is the notion of vox populi vox dei, that whatever is good for The People, is cosmically righteous and cannot be enduringly or effectively criticized. And, that whoever is elected to represent The People, is like sort of a statist Pope — one step removed from Heavenly Glory — they’re here to say what’s-what and what-for.
Well, conservatives have one very good reason to adopt opposition to the Fairness Doctrine as a personal value, not a party one. And that reason is this: It would put the Government in charge of balancing right-rhetoric with left-rhetoric. That means, it would put Government in charge of saying what exactly those are.
Here’s just one example of how that would lead to abuse: We need to ban all guns! Is that left-rhetoric…or central-rhetoric? I think it’s left-rhetoric. But there are folks who disagree with me about that. And the folks who disagree with me about that, seem to have won this little thing called an “election” and are now insisting, rightfully, that they ought now be allowed to make some decisions about things. Who is to say the argument is not “Should we ban all the guns or should we not?”…but rather…”When we ban all the guns, should we wait for people to turn them in voluntarily, or go door-to-door and start grabbing ’em?”
The point is, this blending of personal values and party values, is sort of a “borrowed trait” of communism. What it leads to is a crushing of the minority. You see it in the party schisms that erupt now and then. The Republicans made a decision that Fred Thompson had all the opportunity he should’ve required to showcase something called “charisma” or “fire in the belly” or what-not, something John McCain was somehow never called-upon to display, even once. In so doing, they decided against the wishes of people like me. We bided our time, spoke out, wrote to people…yes, we blogged too…and by the end of August, McCain threw us a bone by picking Sarah Palin. Then he got his ass whipped, and now we have to argue about whether he lost because of Palin, or in spite of her. We can quibble about that, but the point is, all this debating between stalwarts and milquetoasts will remain lively and vigorous, in lean times as well as fat.
The democrat party doesn’t work that way. The dust-up between Obamatons and Hillary supporters was heated, enduring, embarrassing…and desperate. Each faction in that schism was in a battle for its continued survival, because each faction understood, once the other one prevailed, the commandment that would emerge would be “convert or die!” And so it was. Once Obama was the nominee, the call went forth for “party unity.” Very much like, once a labor union votes to strike, the wishes of those who don’t want to strike (or cannot afford to strike) are marginalized. Who cares if you, as an individual, don’t want to strike? Who cares if you need to be working? The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few…or the one. We voted on this, and you don’t count anymore; you’ve been effectively “zombie-fied.” The majority needs your body, but not your mind. Yesterday’s desire is today’s requirement. Party values become personal values.
The whole thing works very much like a religious cult that way.
Poor Britons. Looks like this is my day to pick on ’em. I don’t mean for things to be that way…I didn’t make ’em that way…they did.
A teenager was repeatedly stabbed in front of his 13-year-old brother before dying in his sister’s arms.
Stephen Lewis, 15, was attacked by a gang of youths as he left a charity event aimed at campaigning against youth violence.
The irony… It is KILLING us. Fortunately for us, only in a figurative sense. Poor Stephen was not so lucky. He died as a victim of “sensible gun laws” etc. etc. etc., all aimed at rendering the subjects of the socialist nanny state utterly helpless in the face of vicious predators. And we’re not just talking about their own government here.
That link goes to Rachel Lucas, who has two other stories to go with this one. Equally disgusting.
Tea. Crates. Ships. Boston Harbor. Ker-SPLOOSH.
I haven’t watched all 17 minutes yet, and don’t have the time. Just wanted to bookmark it. Yeah, I’m an “Obama-Age Gun Buyer.” We’re looking seriously at some 9mm. Neighborhood’s okay, but the comments about police response definitely apply…at least, if traffic is any indication, and I think it is. People drive however they want, not a cop to be found anywhere. So we’ll be getting some protection while we still can.
Hat tip: Odecko.
…in North Dakota, but few, or no, murders.
North Dakota experienced only two murders in 2008. Both were stabbings. Not a single firearm murder in the state. Meanwhile, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership has ranked North Dakota 44 out of 50 in gun control.
Update: Similar trend in gun-friendly New Hampshire:
Two
murdersnon-justifiable homicides (10% of all homicides) committed with a gun in the entire state of New Hampshire (population 1.32 million).
Hat tip: Inst.
He certainly does seem sure of himself.
The Founding Fathers of our country made a mistake when they said we had the right to bear arms. They did not know we would be allies with the British and no longer have to worry about them coming over to oppress and colonize us. The British found greater spoils in Africa and India and never looked back on the United States after the Revolutionary War.
The right to bear arms is killing all of us. In 2005 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported 3,006 children and teens killed by gunfire, most of them young, black men in inner-city neighborhoods. And CNN reported yesterday that black-on-black murder of young black men is up 40 percent from last year. The harder the times get, the higher these statistics will go.
Do people really not recognize the danger involved in this mindset, that when times get tough we should expect people to kill each other because it’s only natural, like perspiring on a hot day?
Hat tip to Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.
Two armed men barged into a Subway Sandwich shop shortly after 11 p.m., demanding money from the employee, behind the counter. When they tried to force John Lovell – the lone customer, age 71, into the bathroom, he pulled out a gun and shot both men, police said.
Donicio Arrindell, 22, was shot in the head and later died at the hospital. Fredrick Gadson, 21, was shot in the chest and ran from the Subway, but police found him in hiding in some bushes on the property of a nearby BankAtlantic.
Lovell, 71. Police said he had a concealed weapons permit. Retired US Marine.
But the grandmother of the hoodlum who survived the (hoodlum-initiated) incident, has a beef with the way the media has been portraying this. I dunno what she’s talking about; as far as I know, the most prominent example of how “the media” has portrayed the (hoodlum-initiated) incident is the one I read over here.
I found it to be friendly to the pro-hoodlum side of things, that is, the pro-chaos anti-respect-for-property side, to the point of self-parody. It’s the one that put Grandma’s favorite sound bite right in the freakin’ headline.
Family Of Subway Robbery Suspect Says Customer Shouldn’t Have Pulled Trigger
The family of one of the men who was shot by a retired United States Marine while they attempted to rob a Subway sandwich shop said the customer shouldn’t have pulled the trigger.
According to Plantation police, two armed men barged into the Subway at 1949 Pine Island Road shortly after 11 p.m. Wednesday, demanding money from the employee behind the counter. When they tried to force John Lovell into the bathroom, he pulled out a gun and shot both men, police said.
Donicio Arrindell, 22, was shot in the head and later died at the hospital. Fredrick Gadson, 21, was shot in the chest and ran from the Subway, but police found him in hiding in some bushes on the property of a nearby BankAtlantic.
Lovell, 71, was the lone customer at the time. Police said he had a concealed weapons permit.
Gadson’s grandparents told Local 10 on Thursday that Lovell was wrong for pulling the trigger.
“He should not have taken the law in his hands,” said Rosa Jones, Gadson’s grandmother.
Her husband, Ivory Jones, also condemned the media for its portrayal of Lovell’s actions.
“I don’t condone what they did, (but) I definitely don’t condone the news people making him out to seem like they’re making a hero out of this man because he shot somebody down,” he said.
Ah yes — as Maxwell Smart would say, THE OL’ “He Shouldn’ta Done It BUT” ploy…oldest one in the book.
He shouldn’ta shot your grandson because the way things are, your poor grandson never knows when he’s going to get shot next? I got a great suggestion. Don’t rob stores.
As Blogger Cap’n opines further…
As stated in the SCOTUS decision – a gun levels the playing field – a victim has a chance against their aggressors. Where else does a 71 year old have a chance against two gun wielding 20 year old? How much imagination does it take to imagine reversing this narrative – an employee and 71 year old customer are found dead in a Subway bathroom? Not much, right?
And how about the criminal being the “victim” here? That sickens me. John Lovell isn’t a vigilante. He defended his life. Now he’s alive. Simple.
And yes, I have rewritten this story, because the first time I read it – it was very anti John Lovell. The fact John is alive was on the bottom of the story, and the Grandma statement was on the masthead of the story. Totally bogus.
Well done, Cap’n. And this is a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one.
I do not trust these “shouldn’ta” people. What’s she talking about — and to be more precise about it, why isn’t she getting asked? Is she saying there are two different levels of “shouldn’ta” here, with her grandson violating the lesser one and Mr. Lovell transgressing against the greater one?
If that is the case — add looming injustice to the list of reasons why you shouldn’t rob stores.
If that is not what she is trying to say — what’s the freakin’ problem? Her grandson did something wrong, and found out why you shouldn’t do that.
Either way, in my book she’s been exposed as a proponent of lawlessness. But I know how these things work. She’d deny this in nothing flat and the whole exchange would turn into a “nailing jello to a tree” exercise, as her intended meaning is buried behind thick veils of deceit and obfuscation. I know this because she’s not alone. There are millions of people just like her; they want what they want when they want it, hell with everybody else, and they act like anyone who stands up to them has the same problems they do.
If she’s raising any other grandchildren, I hope they’re taken away. In a sane world, she’d be under investigation for encouraging exactly the anarchy and lawlessness I know she is. One powder-puff press conference and she gets to put John Lovell on the defensive, for doing what he had to do to stay alive. And she takes the opportunity to do it. Good Lord, what a nasty, vile woman.
Via Six Meat Buffet, a fascinating glimpse into the liberal mind. The occasion is the attempted mugging of Brian Beutler, a Washington, DC resident and prominent “progressive” blogger. The confrontation culminated in three bullets entering Beutler’s body.
Looks like he’s going to be okay.
The real meat of the story, though, is this big huge pile o’comments entered on the Talking Points Memo. Apparently, there was something mentioned regarding Beutler’s wish that his misfortune not be used to argue one side or the other of the gun control issue or any other political issue, and both sides dutifully…did not comply.
Naturally as you might expect, the pro-gun-control (now anti-Constitution! Ah, feels good to say that!) side is pure fantasy. Fantasize that the pro-gun-rights commenter is “angry” just because he exposed the logical flaws in your argument. Fantasize that if people use guns to defend themselves, it just sets off a big nuclear-fission-like chain reaction. Fantasize that if violence is simply outlawed, it magically goes away and everyone thinks happy-thoughts.
…even gunslingers end up being on the bad end of the drop.
I’m sure the trolls imagine themselves whipping out a gun (while strolling arm and arm with a significant other) and blasting dude away – even though dude has the drop on them.
And the grand slam…one Mike Powe…
Good idea!
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” — Pogo
“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars… Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” — ML King
Yeah, much easier to simply kill people, maybe nail an innocent bystander or two, than to actually solve the problems that lead to the violence.
This is what you need to do to make a left-wing idea look good. Any problem the feeble liberal mind manages to dig up against the conservative viewpoint, no matter how half-baked and nonsensical it is, has to be awarded instant overwhelming cosmetic merit. It is like a needle against a balloon. And as far as the weaknesses in those questions, or in the original liberal argument, these are not to be inspected.
Nowhere does this inequity cause greater damage, than in this amusing show of analyzing tactics. The notion that a gun can be used to prevent a crime is held up to ridicule, in spite of the statistics that show yes, it does happen…and much of the time, the defensive weapon isn’t even discharged.
Meanwhile, love is supposed to be the answer. How that works is left unclear, but it’s got something to do with “solv[ing] the problems that lead to the violence.” And don’t you dare question that!
This intellectual insincerity is serviced by means of a heavy bias in shaping which role with which the audience should feel the greater sympathy, between the robber and the victim. You’re supposed to imagine yourself as the victim, and to be intimidated from taking any steps to defend yourself. You aren’t supposed to relate to the mugger that way, of course; that would be a short conversation indeed. “You’re looking for someone to rob in a ‘shall issue’ jurisdiction that permits concealed-carry. Do you go through with it?” “Hell no!”
No, there’s a different, passive flavoring of sympathy set aside for the perpetrator of the crime. There are “economic circumstances” of some kind. We aren’t supposed to think about the economic circumstances of the victim, of course. So all the personal “Put Yourself Here” sympathy is set aside for the victim, and all the economic sympathy is directed toward the perpetrator.
That’s the trouble with letting emotions decide these things. He who thinks with his feelings, is left with the impression that he’s in command of the thought process but he’s really outsourced it to the charlatan who’s trying to sell him on something. You’re supposed to feel this way about this guy; you’re supposed to feel that way about that guy. Now with those rules in place how do you feel about my gun control ideas?
But of course, there isn’t any solid evidence anywhere that gun control reduces crime (I should say “reduced,” back in those olden days when it was supposedly-constitutional. Yipee!)
There isn’t even any evidence anywhere that gun-grabbers or other left-wingers are even very nice people. They talk about “love” and wanting to end “violence,” but when someone simply questions them about how things work they get indescribably nasty.
Get well, dude. Sorry if you were really trying to avoid a gun control debate out of this incident. I can see why. Oh well, I didn’t start it.
In our relatively recent memory, there is a micro-era just 76 months long that shook the world. That this tiny epoch exists in our past, says a great deal about how we live with each other, how we’re slaves to fad and fashion, and how we’re not nearly as independent as we like to think we are.
My son’s been having this interest in cultural events that immediately preceded his birth, which was in ’97. This could be a sign of genius, if he knows what he’s doing…something that is always open to question. It could be hereditary. In my case, back in my childhood I had an interest in what was going on in the sixties and seventies, barely conscious of the fact that “big things” were going on, and I didn’t quite understand what they were. But they were bigger than me. My similar interest was decidedly a case of not knowing what I was doing. If I had my childhood to live all over again, knowing back then what I know now about post-modern feminism and the effect it’s had on our culture and on our public policy, I would have read every single newspaper I possibly could have gotten my hands on.
There are cycles, waves, and other such patterns involved in the way we value things across time. We’ve always had this tendency to elevate one demographic onto a pedestal, and bury another one shoulders-deep into the ground for a vicious virtual-stoning. We take turns doing this, and throughout it all we have this self-deceptive way of telling ourselves we’re treating everyone “equally” when we all know it isn’t true. It’s a delicious and intriguing piece of human hypocrisy, something woven deeply into us inseparable from our body chemistries.
Maybe we picked it up when we bit that damned apple. Who knows.
And we exercise it as individuals. In a couple of years, my son will be a teenager and the “My Dad Knows Everything” phase will come to a bitter end. I’ll be the clueless dolt who doesn’t know a damn thing.
In the meantime, my son likes James Bond movies. He seems to be in search of the elusive James Bond question that his father can’t answer. And always, always, we keep coming back to the above-mentioned chapter. He’s figured out that the history of the movie franchise is inseparable from the history of modern America…double-oh seven’s adopted parental country. How it is connected, he’s not quite completely sure. But he understands there is a connection.
Always, we come back to the elephant in the room. The one thing about the superspy that cannot be ignored…but defies explanation because it defies definition. The one things in Bond’s timeline that is absolutely intermingled with and inseparable from ours. I’ve made several casual references to it, but have never thoroughly explored it before in these pages.
The Dark Age.
The time when the Knight of the Cold War underwent a timeless and decidedly female fantasy — the story of Persephone, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. He was taken away. He slept. The world tried, and arguably failed, to get along without him.
This has been an educational experience for me; the one facet to this Dark Age that fascinates me, above all else, is that it is a classic case of the few dictating the tastes of the many. We recall it — when we do — as a grassroots event, a natural consequence of the everyday folks getting fed up with an over-saturation of machismo. It simply isn’t true. It wasn’t bottom-up; it was top-down. Our elders decided they knew what was best for us, and they decided we were tired of James Bond. It was part of a much larger thing. Manhood was out of style. Masculinity, it was thought…although nobody came out and said straight-out, for it made far too little sense…was something that enshrouded us in the age of warfare, and now that the Cold War was over manhood no longer had a home. Anywhere. It was time for it to go away.
And so it became obligatory for the Lords and Vicounts and High Priests to instruct the peasants not to like James Bond. Or cigars, or martinis, or…well…anything you might’ve seen your “daddy” doing, be it Yankee or Anglican.
Working on cars on a summer day in an old greasy tee shirt. Drinking beer. Knowing best. Peeing on a tree. Opening jars for the wife. Telling dirty jokes. Growing facial hair. We were “above” all that, as we explored this new chapter in which 007 would be 86’d.
James Bond’s long slumber, the span between the sixteenth and seventeenth film installments, neatly bookends a small era in which we wanted none of these things…because we were told we should want no such things. And this year, as my son teeters on the brink of teenagerhood and is about to lose his curiosity about the Dark Age, and as Senator Hillary Clinton repeatedly struggles and fails to bring the Dark Age back again, perhaps it would be fruitful to re-inspect exactly what happened to us.
Supposedly, what happened was that Ian Fleming’s creation stalled out with the always-crescendoing legal troubles that arose from ownership disputes. There is certainly some truth to this; the evidence seems to suggest, on the question of Fleming taking indecent liberties with Kevin McClory’s contribution of the storyline in Thunderball, that Fleming is actually guilty. But it doesn’t really matter, does it. The very thing that makes this explanation plausible, is the thing that makes this explanation all bollywonkers and gunnybags. James Bond, at least in film form, has always been in legal trouble over this McClory issue. It is the reason there were two James Bonds in 1983. It is the reason that, in For Your Eyes Only two years previous, there was that surreal “Blofeld” appearance nobody can explain completely — the one with the smokestack, the wheelchair, the helicopter, and the delicatessen in stainless steel. Yeah, that.
Personally, I’ve never completely bought into this line that James Bond went away because of legal problems. He went away because he was out of style. Our feminists didn’t want us watching him. They told us what to do, and we obeyed our feminists. Starting with Hollywood, which made the regrettable decision — and today, looking back, the most ludicrous one — that the most profitable years of double-oh seven were in the past.
When one inspects what James Bond really is, one can easily see why our feminists have always hated him so much. He isn’t really a British spy, you know. He is the very apex of male fantasy. Let’s face it, international espionage doesn’t really have a great deal to do with saving the world from a madman with a laser orbiting the planet. It certainly doesn’t have to do with Aston-Martin automobiles, or sleeping with a lot of women. Or wearing a two thousand dollar suit and a three thousand dollar watch, when a couple hundred bucks divided among the two of those acquisitions will do quite nicely.
No, what those things have in common is that they typify male fantasy. They define manhood. Being entrusted with an important job, going about it, noticing something is about to happen that will injure millions of people you don’t even want to ever meet, preventing an enormous disaster and then retreating back into the shadows to go about your more mundane daily duties. Huh. I’ve just described the typical Superman episode. I’ve also just described a day in the life of any knight sitting at King Arthur’s round table. This is male fantasy that goes back a good stretch before Ian Fleming’s parents ever met.
And as frosting on the cake of feminist hatred toward the British superspy…once these male fantasies solidify into a newest James Bond movie installment, and the knuckledragging males like myself move heaven and earth to go see it…we don’t go alone. No, we bring our women along. Yes, women following men into the theater to watch a man’s movie. And we don’t jam our “honey do jars” full of bits of paper promising to do this or that pain-in-the-ass thing in compromise. We don’t have to. Our women want to go. Our women want to see the next James Bond movie more than we do.
This is what earns James Bond a fatwa from the feminist movement. He reminds us that men are noble creatures, and that women are complicated. Our feminists tend to hunger for the exact opposite, you know…they like men to be disposable and they like women to be simple. But with not a single sign of Meg Ryan crying, or Hugh Grant acting like a dork, the simple woman isn’t supposed to be having any fun. And she wouldn’t be. Yet the latest Bond flick comes out, and our women are practically jumping in the car, warming up the engine for us, offering to buy the popcorn.
James Bond is a sign that feminists may have more to learn about women, than anybody else.
And so, during the Dark Age, they killed him. They did what feminists desire to do: Shape our culture and define the values we exercise therein. Glittering recruiting-buzzwords like “power” and “freedom” and “choice” really have very little to do with any of it.
But…when angry women want us to do things, we find it hard to tell them no.
For the two thousand three hundred and thirteen days that began in the summer of 1989, James Bond slept.
The world went un-saved.
And when the experiment was over, it turned out — maybe the world doesn’t need saving after all — but it certainly does need James Bond. That male fantasy that he’s really all about. We depend on it; that’s just the way it is, and the feminists can get as grouchy about that as they want to get, but it’s true and will always remain such.
The feminist edict that James Bond should go away, began the way all cultural impulses do: With a tailwind, and on a downward slope. It caught on because resistance was at a low ebb. Certain external events created a climate in which it was handy and convenient to suggest a retirement from MI6 and from Hollywood. The AIDS crisis had reached a plateau, and some would say it was still on a sharp upswing. The baby boom generation, always numerous, always powerful, and always hostile to anything that might have been identified with the generation previous to them, had reached middle age and they started to occupy positions that were powerful, positions in which “real” decisions were made about things. And with Russia’s troubles, anything even remotely connected to a “cold war” seemed naturally headed to the trash heap.
It was Timothy Dalton’s second venture in this role. It is sometimes said that his style, notable in fidelity to the book version of Agent 007, grated on the movie audiences and there may be some truth to this as well. But another thing about Dalton that doesn’t get a lot of mention is that he was the first “Fountain of Youth” James Bond. Fans were expected to believe this was the same guy who outwitted Dr. No in 1962 and wrecked that railroad car on the Orient Express with Red Grant the following year; here he was, maybe seventy years old, wrestling control of an airplane in mid-flight after waterskiing behind it in his bare feet. The storyline was original enough, involving Bond’s defection from the British Secret Service and carrying out a personal vendetta on behalf of his friend Felix Leiter. And Robert Davi had all kinds of things going for him as the bad guy. He was dark, sinister, bloodthirsty, cruel and charming.
But — and looking back on it, this was probably the nail in the coffin — the bad guy was also a drug lord. In the previous film, The Living Daylights, it turned out that bad guy was also a drug lord. James Bond fighting the war on drugs. Nothing says “past the prime” quite like that.
The only sense of continuity was that Dalton had signed up to do three movies, and this was the second. Other than that, there was no momentum at all.
The death knell also came from bad returns, and the bad returns undoubtedly resulted from bad promotion. The film competed with Batman; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Lethal Weapon 2 and many others. Bond had been a summer phenomenon with every film appearance since The Spy Who Loved Me, but evidently the time had come to re-think that, and perhaps it was re-thought a bit too late.
When the thumping came from the dismal revenues, feminists, and others invested against Bond’s success, trumpeted that we were tired of men saving the world from disaster, conveniently ignoring the success of Die Hard just a year ago. The talking point stuck. They talked it up and talked it up. Meanwhile, MGM/UA sued Danjaq, the parent holding company of Bond-related trademarks and copyrights…another outgrowth of the McClory mess.
That winter, in a dark omen about the times in which we were about to live, carefully sanitized of any male heroism or derring-do or respect for same, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at the University of Montreal. The Montreal Massacre has come to epitomize what’s wrong with feminism, why it is the very last mindset that should have anything, whatsoever, with the formation of public policy.
Let us summarize it here: Feminists talked down male heroism. They opposed it at every turn. They poured vast sums of money and energy into sneering at it, indoctrinating entire generations of people to the idea that the Real Man is a myth, and if he is indeed real he serves no purpose, in fact is something toxic and ugly. And Mark Steyn, quoting himself after the Virginia Tech shooting, fills us in on what happened next:
Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
The conclusion is inescapable. Masculinity was killed, and soon after it the real women it had been defending.
Well, Mark Steyn has his opinion about what it all means, but the prevailing viewpoint has another take on it…
Since the attack, Canadians have debated various interpretations of the events, their significance, and Lépine’s motives. Many feminist groups and public officials have characterized the massacre as an anti-feminist attack that is representative of wider societal violence against women. Consequently, the anniversary of the massacre has since been commemorated as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Other interpretations emphasize Lépine’s abuse as a child or suggest that the massacre was simply the isolated act of a madman, unrelated to larger social issues. Still other commentators have blamed violence in the media and increasing poverty, isolation, and alienation in society, particularly in immigrant communities.
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The massacre was a major spur for the Canadian gun control movement. One of the survivors, Heidi Rathjen, who was in one of the classrooms Lépine did not enter during the shooting, organized the Coalition for Gun Control with Wendy Cukier. Susan and Jim Edwards, the parents of one of the victims, were also deeply involved. Their activities, along with others, led to the passage of Bill C-68, or the Firearms Act, in 1995, ushering in stricter gun control regulations. These new regulations included new requirements on the training of gun owners, screening of firearm applicants, new rules concerning gun and ammunition storage and the registration of all firearms. The gun registry in particular has been a controversial and partisan issue, with critics charging that it was a political move by the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien that has been expensive and impractical to enforce.
Who’s right? Form whatever opinion you wish to form; I’ve formed mine. This culture conflict between male-friendly and male-hostile forces had been going on for awhile, and ultimately it culminated in the death of James Bond, the greatest family-friendly male fantasy material ever put to the big screen. And then the Montreal Massacre showed us the horrific consequences in store for us if we eradicate masculinity…and in response to that…our neighbors to the North, in their infinite wisdom, eradicated masculinity some more. Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — as if deranged gunmen pay attention to such things, before making the fateful decision to go charging through a college campus shooting people.
Little things began to happen in popular culture about this time, poisoning the well just a little bit further. The Simpsons premiered — the madcap adventures of a little poorly-drawn cartoon boy named Bart. It turned out his doofus dad Homer had special resonance with our now thoroughly-vaginized audience, and in the years to come the family patriarch would steal center stage. Homer Simpson, in this way, continued the trend set by Al Bundy in Married…With Children — albeit as a less sympathetic character — and the Age of the Doofus Dad began in earnest.
On the big screen and the little screen, things started popping up “geared toward” girls and women…which means deliberately excluding men. The studios discovered women were feeling a special attraction toward things that not only entertained them, but were assured to provide little-to-no entertainment for anybody else. They called it “tailoring” or “customizing” or “specially targeted” or whatever. The meaning was all the same: Men wouldn’t like it.
Makes sense. Guys, when you take your sweeties to the movies, it should hurt. Makes as much sense as that ring that should cost a lot. Sacrifice is the point.
So we were buried in an avalanche of things men wouldn’t like. The Little Mermaid marked the beginning of what became an annual pilgrimage — Disney would market the hell out of their next big feature cartoon, full of strange people and animals with eyes the size of dinner plates, with obscene volumes of merchandising tie-ins. Next year, they’d go back, Jack, and do it again. All of it “tailored.” Cleansed of anything that might be interpreted as even residual masculine appeal. All of it calculated to make Dad barf.
Steel Magnolias. That spring, Pretty Woman. Ghost. Feelings, feelings, feelings…bits of fluff to make you cry, tossed up there for the purpose of pulling in the little gold statues of the man who has no face.
Ryan White died of AIDS. Such poignant deaths tugged at our heartstrings, and helped to remind us that the era of feelings could not have crested out just yet. It was just getting started. After all, if you resolved to confront the AIDS crisis with your brain instead of with your heart, what in the world would you do? There was nothing to do in the Realm of Thought except throw a little bit more money at the disease. And then a lot more money. Well, when people can’t form a plan that seems complete, they like to feel their way through things so with every AIDS-related news event we did some more feeling.
Manhood being coupled with stoic, rational thinking, it was buried a little further in the ground as we continued to bury our brains. We had to be more sensitive. People were dying of AIDS. Nobody ever explained how being more sensitive would stop AIDS deaths, but that’s the beauty of feeling your way through things — no explanation necessary. Just think happy thoughts. Or sad ones. Whatever fits the occasion. Just be compatible. Doing constructive things, that was out of style now.
The era of James Bond continued to slip into the past. In August of 1990, movie producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli parted company with screenwriter Richard Maibaum, and John Glen, director of the previous five films. Half a year after this unfortunate event, Maibaum would be dead.
The environment took center stage, now that we were being extra-feminized and sensitive. We had a new Earth Day, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the 1970 event, and that summer Captain Planet and the Planeteers premiered on TBS.
Men were understood to be inherently bad and women were understood to be inherently good. We began an endless fascination in women doing those heroic male things, like catching the bad guy. This is the year in which Clarice Starling became famous, as portrayed by Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs. And then there was Thelma and Louise. Of course, the Tailhook scandal helped out a lot. Women were heroes — and hero status was incomplete if it was even suggested that maybe, just maybe, there might be some things men could do that women could not…that wouldn’t do. We pretended otherwise. And if anybody dared to get tired of it, we’d simply explore how women were victims — and that would return them to “hero” status.
The dysfunction that took hold in our society, wasn’t so much that we saw good things in women. The most “patriarchal” societies, contrary to popular belief, have it in common that they have seen women as innately good and worthy of protection — hence the necessity of strong men. No, in the 76 months of this Dark Age, the real damage was irony. Things seemed, to us, to be the opposite of what they really were…starting with strength and weakness. Weakness was now the new strength. In the news as well as in fiction, people were shown to be strong through a ritual of showcasing their frailties. Rodney King was worthy of our attention because he got beaten up. The beating was worth talking about. His leading the police on a high speed chase through a densely populated suburban neighborhood…wasn’t worth talking about, because this didn’t service the goal of portraying King as a victim. Starling was strong because she was a victim. Thelma and Louise were strong because they were victims. The Tailhook ladies were strong because they were victims.
Strong didn’t have anything to do with being ready, willing or able to defend someone in need of a defense. That would be too patriarchal.
In July of 1991, Patricia Ireland succeeded Molly Yard as the head of the National Organization of Women. This was a pivotal event because it was a generational hand-off; Ireland is a baby-boomer, and Yard came from the generation previous. Three months after this, Susan Faludi published her book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Strength-through-victimhood continued.
Feminists, during this time, could be as nasty as they wanted to be. If anyone called it out they’d just call it a “backlash” and do some more complaining about dark and sinister undercurrents in our society, working against them. Meanwhile, James Bond was dead…along with countless other “patriarchal” trinkets, involving far less meaning to us item-by-item than they meant collectively. The feminists were being exactly what they called others. Rodney King’s famous query was “can’t we all just get along?” The irony was, those who worked day and night to make sure everybody heard the question, also labored with equal gusto to make sure the answer was a resounding “Hell, no!”
Jeffry Dahmer was arrested. For eating people. The police got in trouble when it was discovered Dahmer fooled them into returning a bleeding, naked little boy to his care…who he later had for dinner. He ate lots of other people, but the police got in trouble because of this one boy. Don’t worry about Dahmer, he’s probably the last cannibal we’ll see for awhile, but we’d better fix the police because they’re feeding little boys to cannibals!
So the pattern continued. Those who did harm, were presented to us as nothing more than a curiosity…maybe even something deserving of our sympathy. Those whose job it is to protect us from the harm, are presented as part of the real problem. Ostensibly, this is done to make sure our protection is worth something. But every crime needs a protagonist, doesn’t it? If I’m a cop I can’t very well feed someone to a cannibal if there’s no cannibal around, can I? The police were a danger, the protagonist was not.
In November, Freddy Mercury died of AIDS. The feeling-over-thought continued. Bohemian Rhamsody, that winter, blared from every loudspeaker on every radio and every television.
Disorder was the new order. Justice was dispensed, not from the courtroom in which Stacy Koon and his colleagues were acquitted for the Rodney King incident, but in the riots that followed in downtown LA. Again…it was all about solving problems with feeling instead of with thought. Justice becomes a myth when you do that; just a glorified system of might-makes-right. More irony: People who want to disclaim masculinity, manhood, “patriarchal oppression” and so forth claim that as their goal — to elevate themselves and society above an anarchy in which might-makes-right. But that’s exactly what they cause to happen.
Meanwhile, nobody noticed that the Maastricht Treaty had been signed. This was the beginning of the European Union. Just like any other union, it was constructed to “level the playing field” against someone who had an “unfair advantage” — which means to attack that someone. In this case, it was the United States.
The importance of the Maastricht event cannot be overstated. Sixteen years later, we have been dutifully fed our talking points that the United States is seen by our “allies” as an oppressor. Most people who believe this uncritically, fail to comprehend how intricate and robust is the organization that is really responsible for all this “seeing.” It is an international union formed for the purpose of gaining more power…against the United States. With a little bit of a longer memory, one can see there is more to that story than just President George W. Bush. The hostility against America has roots in it, that go all the way back to this event. This quiet event.
Then came the Year of the Woman. It was part of a global fashion trend. That year, Betty Boothroyd had been elected as the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, and Stella Rimington became the first woman head of MI5, the domestic counterpart to Agent 007’s MI6 international espionage branch. The movie industry continued to assault us with their feeling-over-thought anti-man pap: A League of Their Own; Lorenzo’s Oil; Prelude to a Kiss.
Dan Quayle, technically correct, perhaps even prophetic, but hopelessly tone-deaf, gave a speech on the harm Murphy Brown was doing to our society. It was something we needed to have pointed out, but we weren’t ready for it at the time. Our sense of direction was utterly destroyed by now. Chaos looked like order, women looked like men, cops looked like robbers and robbers looked like cops. When cowardliness led to piles of womens’ dead bodies, we thought the best way to protect our women was to embrace more cowardliness. Murphy Brown’s dysfunction? It looked like function.
As Quayle’s boss faced re-election that fall, the worst debate-question ever was asked by pony-tail guy at the debate in Richmond, VA: “How can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the two of you—the three of you—to meet our needs?” Rush Limbaugh provided more context for the quote here (link requires registration with Rush 24/7):
RUSH: Shall we go back to March 30th, 1993, from my Television Show, I played this sound bite from October 15th of 1992. This was the presidential debate, Perot, Clinton and Bush 41 in Richmond, Virginia.
THE PONYTAILED GUY: The focus of my work is domestic mediation, is meeting the needs of the children that I work with by way of their parents and not the wants of their parents, and I ask the three of you, how can we as symbolically the children of the future president expect the two of you, the three of you to meet our needs?
RUSH: That’s the famous Ponytail Guy from the Richmond debate in 1992. These presidential candidates are our fathers, the president’s going to be our father, and what can we expect from our father, you, to meet our needs?
The irony continued. Dependence was independence.
As the Danjaq/MGM case wound its way through the courts, The Crying Game was released…continuing the irony, women were men. Superman, the defender of Truth, Justice, The American Way, died. Just as well. We had some significant questions about what exactly all three of those were…and at the time we didn’t even realize we had those questions. But Superman just plum ran out of ways to save the day — without offending insecure women with his masculine oppression and what-not. So down he went.
Clinton appointed a whole bunch of women to his cabinet. Had he been seeking the best and the brightest for these important positions, he might have accidentally picked some pretty ones, and that would have been threatening. So he made sure they were all physically unappealing. Reno. Shalala. Albright would come later…and of course later that year Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court. I don’t wish to be unkind, but these ladies are homely. To doubt that there was an agenda in place to select them that way, is to doubt the evidence of our senses. If you sent me out to find some that look like this, I’d be out there all day long…probably finding none at all, or no more than one. In one of his first acts of office, not quite content with his retroactive tax increase, he passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, or FMLA.
Because as anybody knows, the first step to making the economy stronger is to make it godawful expensive to hire people. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Country music didn’t escape the Age of Dysfunction either. Eilleen Regina Edwards, better known as Shania Twain, released her debut CD. Country Music purists became apoplectic, and the schism helped to channel this seemingly limitless supply of anti-tradition anti-male energy into lifting the nascent career of the gorgeous Shania…whom, apart from that, had no shortage of assets appealing to the male psyche. There was little or no animosity involved in her lyrics, but a darker culture arose to consume her. No bitter, angry single-mom was complete without a cheap little CD player belting out one Shania Twain cut after another. It was all just so fresh…which sounds deceptively positive. Under the roots of it all, was a underlayer of raw, naked animosity toward anything that was traditional, and/or not yet quite as feminized as it might possibly be.
The Supreme Court decided Wisconsin v. Mitchell, signaling the readiness of our modern culture to consider hate-crime legislation. Who exactly is ready for it, nobody is willing to say; for a judicial-branch decision to drive what the legislative-branch is supposed to do, isn’t quite the way things are supposed to work. But work that way it did, as the Supreme Court decided states have latitude in considering motive for a crime in enhancing the penalties for it.
What’s been mostly forgotten is that the Wisconsin decision concerned an assault on a white fourteen-year-old boy, Gregory Reddick, by a gang of black individuals in Kenosha, who had just seen Mississippi Burning. Todd Mitchell asked the group “Do you all feel hyped up to move on some white people?” — Reddick was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the rest is history.
Todd Mitchell’s penalty was enhanced due to thoughts in his head. The Wisconsin Supreme Court had determined there was something wrong with that, that such an enhancement would have a “chilling effect” on free speech. The Supreme Court overruled, finding “no merit in this contention.” Those are unfortunate words. Penalty enhancements due to thoughts-in-the-head may, with a little bit of trickery, be shoehorned into some functional compatibility with the spirit of our Constitution, or at least with the letter. But “no merit” is a little on the strong side. To say penalties can be enhanced because of free speech exercised, might have a chilling effect on free speech…it does, at the very least, have some merit.
In an act that symbolized exactly what was going on, Lorena Bobbit cut off her husband’s penis and flung it at a stop sign, to fall into a field where it was later retrieved and reattached. Good thing she picked the summer of 1993 as the best time to do it. She was hailed as a feminist hero. The jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and after a court-ordered 45-day psychiatric evaluation, she was released.
She got away with it.
And the feminists said she was exactly what they wanted to be. Good for them. I wonder if, in 2008, they have the decency to be embarrassed by that. But it might be a good idea for the rest of us to remember what exactly “feminism” meant fifteen years ago: Cutting off dicks, or wishing you had the guts to do it.
Kim Campbell was sworn in as the first female Prime Minister of Canada.
President Clinton passed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, then went out to the Rose Garden for a photo op as Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands in a sham peace ceremony. The age of fakery, of built-in irony, of feeling-over-thought, of pretending things weren’t what the cognitive lobes understood them to be…staggered on. Meanwhile, John Wayne Bobbit flirted with porn. It seems he was restored to his potency much more quickly than we were restored to ours.
Sleepless in Seattle assailed our senses, followed closely afterward by the premiere of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Jocelyn Elders was confirmed as our Surgeon General, and the Maastricht Treaty came into effect, forming the European Union.
As Madonna slipped into her Dominatrix outfit, Clinton signed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act into law, then sent his wife down Pennsylvania Avenue to babble some kind of nonsense at Congress about socialized medicine.
On November 13, Star Trek: The Next Generation had an episode called Force of Nature that nearly killed Star Trek. It was about environmentalism. It turns out, when you take a starship above Warp 5 you do some incremental damage to the fabric of the space-time continuum. At the conclusion of this episode, Starfleet, in its infinite wisdom, imposed a galactic speed limit on all starships, bringing the fictitious age of exploring the “final frontier” to a virtual end.
Another metaphorical event of profound poignancy: Ripping apart the fabric of a space-time continuum, was exactly what was taking place in real life. With manhood, our spirit of exploration was dying. And with that, our fastening to logic and truth. We wanted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. We wanted the thoughts in our heads to be regulated, while we were told no such thing was happening. With all the exploring done, we just wanted things extra safe…we wanted our Hillarycare universal health plan.
Lani Guinier, the “quota queen,” was nominated as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
Colin Ferguson, accused of killing six passengers and wounding nineteen on the Long Island railroad, employed the black rage defense. His attorneys tried their best to retroactively declare open season on people, but to no avail. He received six life terms. Hey, at least they tried.
Black rage was first proposed by black psychologists William Grier and Price Cobbs in their book Black Rage (ISBN 1579103499). Grier and Cobbs argue that black people living in a racist, white supremacist society are psychologically damaged by the effects of racist oppression. This damage causes black people to act abnormally in certain situations.
Irony continues. The victim has strength, and is to be respected. Inequality is equality.
Since everybody was instantly good and wonderful if they would just let women do things they previously couldn’t, the Church of England began to ordain female priests. Hugh Grant typified his perpetual role as the hapless clumsy “git” in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Timothy Dalton went on record, announcing his official abdication from the role of James Bond.
Michael Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley. The World Series was canceled, and the FIFA World Cup began in the United States. Enter soccer, exit baseball. But the real insult to the United States was just around the corner: Michael Fay used his American origin as an excuse for spray painting cars in Singapore. You see, we Americans are meek and mild and we’re just not tough enough for that caning punishment they have over there. The skin on our buttocks is especially thin, I suppose. So, you should just let us get away with it. I have a social disease, Officer Krupke! Grasping for the chance to show that chaos is really order and strength is really weakness, President Clinton intervened and bargained the ritual six strokes of the cane down to four.
With our national identity confused, lost, given away, we went through our summer ritual of being buried in annoying, glurgy, anti-male, feeling-over-thought movies. When A Man Loves A Woman. Natural Born Killers. Bad Girls. Blue Sky. Exit to Eden.
Woodstock ’94 commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of something that wasn’t really worth the trouble. Hippies smoking dope listening to music having sex in the mud. It was kind of a bust. The hippies had grown up, gotten jobs, mortgages, heads full of gray hair…and some nice suits that couldn’t get muddy.
ER premiered.
Hillarycare was quietly abandoned. We just weren’t going for it…yet.
A new Star Trek movie came out in which Kirk and Picard would appear together. This started lots of Kirk/Picard comparisons…wonderfully entertaining, all of them…but again, metaphorical toward the confusion and dysfunction we felt during these 76 months. The overall trend was that Kirk was more dependable and effective when confronted with a crisis, but Picard was more desirable…for reasons left unstated, or stated only vaguely. His propensity to surrender was thought to be an asset. Again, weakness is strength.
Disclosure came out, asking us to imagine an event in which a woman is guilty of sexual harassment (including an unfortunately ludicrous and silly scene in which Michael Douglas is given a blow job against his will).
We showed some signs of an early bloom in this 330-week winter. We voted in a Republican Congress, and Dr. Elders was finally forced to resign. Peter Jennings said we were having a “temper tantrum.”
When the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up, they blamed talk radio and angry white men.
Bryant Gumbel, then co-host on the NBC News Today show, reported that “The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that’s been coming from the right and those who cater to angry white men. While no one’s suggesting right-wing radio jocks approve of violence, the extent to which their approach fosters violence is being questioned by many observers, including the president…”
We were being told what to think and what not to think. But dependence was independence.
Women continued to take on male roles in fiction. One expensive production after another failed, either in the short term or over the long haul, but the producers insisted on believing women could look appealing just by doing manly things. Real entertainment is expensive, after all. And so Hercules had an episode called “The Warrior Princess” which spun off into its own show; “Star Trek: Voyager” premiered. Of the latter, the only draw was that the Captain of the vessel was a woman. Who acted a lot like a man. It was rather painful and boring to watch, but it did endure for seven seasons, the Warrior Princess for six.
In those early days, success was sure to be had so long as the personalities showcased were not straight, white and male. And so 1995 brought in the now-ritual summer of glurgy anti-male-ness and anti-family-ness and anti-thought-ness…Babe, Pocahontas, Boys on the Side, Bridges of Madison County. Copycat, Scarlet Letter. And, let us not forget the Macarena being released. Looking silly is serious business.
Sandra Bullock, in the first movie appearance since she lit up the screen in Speed, embarked on a new rejuvenated career dedicated to chick flicks — with While You Were Sleeping. Funny. Thirteen years later, I have yet to remain awake all the way through that movie.
Nearly three years after Barbara Boxer began her vendetta against him, Sen. Bob Packwood was forced to resign. A few years later, she’d circle the wagons around President Clinton for doing something much worse…I guess inconsistency is consistency. But with Packwood gone, we could talk about women being victims again, especially with Shannon Faulker’s adventures at The Citadel. Victims are strong because weakness is strength.
On November 13, 1995, the 2,313 day winter was finally brought to a thaw as Goldeneye was released. It received two BAFTA nominations and earned $26 million during its opening, the most successful Bond movie since Moonraker.
Why?
It should be obvious by now. We had been starved. We had been denied what we, men and women, really want: That old story, the knight-of-the-round-table story. Disaster prevented. Good thing that strong smart resourceful guy was where he was.
Women, somewhere, may be capable of doing what men can do. But there is no fantasy there. Nor do we have any inner lust toward this phony irony, wherein victimhood is strength, femininity is masculinity, unfairness is justice, thought control is freedom, chaos is order, dependence is independence. We know, deep down, all of us, that that’s all crap — we can only snack on it for so long before we get sick of it. Three hundred thirty weeks…it’s far too much to ask of us. Can’t keep it up.
Eventually, we have to return to our programming and our programming has to do with truth, logic, and order. That is what our programming is all about, for our programming has to be consistent with nature. If it were not, we would not be here. And so we like to see a strong masculine figure preventing disaster, for the benefit of people he has never met and never will meet. A man…defusing a bomb. A man…lifting a concrete slab off a baby who is miraculously unharmed. A man…fishing a kitten out of a tree…or shooting a terrorist who was about to wear a dynamite belt to a pizzeria. Men see that, and they feel better about themselves because they want to be that guy; women see that, and they feel better because they understand someone somewhere believes they are worth defending.
What was this long winter, the Dark Age in which James Bond slumbered away, really about?
It was about abjuring reason…for the sole purpose of feeling good…and failing. Once it was over, we felt better than we’d ever felt since it began. Let that be a lesson to us: To plagiarize Franklin, those who disclaim logic, reason and masculine symbiosis for a good feeling and “self esteem,” deserve none of these things and shall ultimately have none of these things.
This morning I was rubbing my hands together in giddy glee over the finding that the Nintendo Wii is not environmentally friendly, or at least, is not perceived to be that (Nintendo’s crime against the environment seems to be mostly related to a failure to divulge information about being clean, which is different from a substantiation of evidence about being dirty). My comment was,
The anti-corporate pro-enviro hippies, are hopefully going to be locked in a huge fracas with the video-gamers and therefore with the kid-dumbing-down people. I hope. It’s always fun to watch the anti-achievement types feast on their own.
Hundreds of thousands of e-mails have poured in and called my attention to…
…alright, nobody’s uttered a peep about it. But it nevertheless occurs to me, even though this is The Blog That Nobody Reads, that I should expound.
Surely you’ve noticed, haven’t you. The people here stateside as well as across the pond in Europe, who are so quick to rap us across the knuckles for taking out Saddam Hussein — offer little or no alternatives for us to defend ourselves in any other way from the threat of worldwide terror. Oh yes, I know, many among them will say we were “distracted” from the “hunt for Osama bin Laden” when he was “in Afghanistan.” They imply in a bullying way, but usually do not come out and say word-for-word in any true sense of commitment, that had we focused on Afghanistan they’d be behind our defensive efforts a hundred percent.
These are the very same folks who are all gung-ho about going after the globular-wormening ManBearPig, insisting that the climate of the earth is changing, we homo sapiens are the cause, it’s a done deal, the “science is settled,” and hey even if this turns out not to be the case it’s just as well that we act as if it is.
You can see where I’m going with this now. They insist that the benefit of the doubt be awarded to the course-of-action that involves doing…on this issue over here…and the option that involves not doing on that issue over there.
People like me, on the other hand, are “inconsistent” in the opposite way; I think we should not do, here, and do, there.
Who is more properly inconsistent? Well, the most jarring empirical evidence, which is people-gettin’-killed, it seems to me is on my side. This thing over here hasn’t killed anyone. That issue over there has killed thousands…oh yeah, oh yeah, I know, no solid evidence connecting Saddam to the terrorist attacks, but that’s kind of my point. These people, in addition to being inconsistent, are nuts. The “no evidence” is just as good as “close my eyes and yell la-la-la-la I can’t hear you.” The people who say we should act even though we don’t know anything, about ManBearPig, are the same ones who say we should not act because we don’t know anything on a different threat that really has killed people.
So my point is this: Since there are so many of these people, and they all agree with each other in near-lock-step about both Iraq and globular-wormening ManBearPig…two issues on which their mindsets conform to completely opposite philosophies about how we should behave on important issues when certainty is not forthcoming and doubt is rampant. In fact, we can toss in a third issue without upsetting this solidarity one bit, I notice: Guns and self-defense. People who are pro-global-warming-curtailing, are anti-Iraq, and pro-gun-control. The consistency from one pair of ears to the next, is just amazing. It’s north of 99 percent. So I say, let us look for consistencies in the arguments. Let us look for common threads that are sustained among these three issues, in the way all these people perceive them and grapple with them. Are there some?
I see one.
Before I get to that, though, let’s inject a fourth issue in a round-about way…and let us do this, by exploring one of my favorite web sites: TrafficCalming.org, where you can learn how to thwart, obstruct, derail and generally bollux-up the efforts of your neighboring human beings to…well…to move their asses from one place to the next. Which means, now, just about anything else anyone would be able to do once they get there.
This deepens, but does not broaden, our chore of looking for common threads. If you think it’s settled RIGHT NOW that we should do something about globular wormening, but we need to shut down the War on Terror, but we need to grab everybody’s guns and lock ’em up — you probably think traffic calming is a wonderful thing. If you roll your eyes at it like I do, you probably think ManBearPig is a big ol’ scam, you probably think Saddam Hussein was just as much a dangerous spoiler jackass in 2003 as he was in 1993 & it’s a good thing he’s gone, and you think the Second Amendment actually means what it says: Right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
So traffic calming, you see, fits right into the mold.
Traffic calming consists of operational measures such as enhanced police enforcement, speed displays, and a community speed watch program, as well as such physical measures as edgelines, chokers, chicanes, traffic circles, and (for the past four years) speed humps and raised crosswalks.
Edglines.
Chokers.
Chicanes, traffic circles, speed bumps and raised crosswalks.
What are these things? Well, they are devices that make traffic safe by making assumptions about you, the driver, which in turn cannot be borne out as legitimate or truthful unless they are analyzed in a purely statistical venue. If you go faster than X speed, you must be dangerous. If you can be bullied and cudgeled and coerced into going slower than X speed, you must be safe. If it’s three thirty in the morning and nobody’s around, why, that don’ matter none. You have to go slower than twenty-five miles per hour, and once we make you drive that slowly, surely some lives will be saved.
It sounds like it came from…from…could it be? Why, yes it is!
European traffic calming began as a grassroots movement in the late 1960s. Angry residents of the Dutch City of Delft fought cut-through traffic by turning their streets into woonerven, or “living yards.” This was followed by the development of European slow streets (designed for 30 kph or 20 mph) in the late 1970s; the application of traffic calming principles to intercity highways through small Danish and German towns in the 1980s; and the treatment of urban arterials in areawide schemes, principally in Germany and France, also in the 1980s. [emphasis mine]
Gotta hand it to those Europeans. The European ego isn’t one bit bruised by the fact that we yankees came up with the telephone…the car…the airplane…the innernets. They’ve got their claim to fame East of Greenwich. When you’re a busy guy trying to get things done, relying on all this American technology to beat the deadline so that that other guy can beat his deadline so that the people depending on him can meet their deadlines…here come the Europeans to mess everything up for you!
Thought you were getting to Point B by two-thirty this afternoon did you? Not after our roundabouts and raised crosswalks get done. Now feel the wrath of the residents of Delft!
The really interesting thing about traffic calming, is its effectiveness is measured in traffic retardation on a miles/kilometers-per-hour basis, and a percentage basis — not on the basis of lives saved. I have to look at that a little bit funny. I have no choice but to do so.
I live in Folsom. We have our own “traffic calming” in terms of poorly-designed controlled intersections. Traffic lights that turn red just as you get to them, should you fail to exceed the speed limit by less than twenty miles an hour, and all that. You think that “calms” traffic, everybody in their shiny BMW’s having to stop constantly when they shouldn’t have to? Hell no. It turns them all into raging jackasses.
Sorry, fellow Folsom residents. You know it’s true. You know it damn good and well.
So on the notion that this makes traffic safer…I have to call bull poo. Even if you can pump out hundreds of studies showing the rate of speed has slowed. That’s a point in my favor, isn’t it? All the jackasses are spending more time inside city limits, after having been offered increased motivation for going all jackass?
There is a lesson here about human psychology. It is what ties together all these “let’s go ahead and stop global warming even though there’s no solid evidence we have to” types…in with the “naughty naughty naughty shame on you for taking out Saddam Hussein” types. It is what makes these two camps come together, even though their respective doctrines are 180 degrees opposed from each other. It is what makes them all such loud, bossy sunzabiches.
It is this:
When you’ve made the decision that the stuff you do in your life doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be given much priority, you rankle at the idea of the stuff anybody else does with their lives being given any more priority than your stuff. The traffic-calming measures, with all the phony egghead studies “proving” that things must be safer because the traffic moves slower — they are metaphorical, of something much deeper and much more meaningful. When you’re in this boat, you want everybody to stop whatever it is they’re doing. To slow way down…until they stop. And sit. There’s really nothing rational about it. It’s a primal urge.
You don’t want anybody to make it anywhere on time to be able to do anything. Because you know you aren’t doing anything.
You don’t want anybody’s kids to grow up with a feeling of self worth, since your own kids aren’t growing up that way.
You don’t want anybody to consume anything, because you can’t justify consuming anything yourself. You can pretend you’re disturbed about the prospect of the whatever-it-is being depleted…but the truth of the matter is, you just want all motion around you to stop. Because you yourself aren’t moving.
That’s why the people who want to take your guns away are the same ones waggling their fingers at you about “emitting carbon” and those are the same people who prattle on about an “illegal and unjust war” — we should presume action is warranted in the face of doubt on one issue, and not on another issue. And those are the same people who think traffic is automatically safer if the drivers are frustrated in the efforts to get where they want to go. And those people, in turn, are the same ones getting all peevish if you buy your nephew a toy gun for his birthday. And those are the same people insisting that if said nephew is acting a little bit weird, he should be doped up on drugs and put in a special program.
And that once you’ve eventually triumphed over the round-abouts and traffic circles and gotten where you wanted to go, and made some money from doing it…you should be taxed up the ass. It’s human potential. It offends them.
This is easily substantiated. Because once you open your mind to the evidence involved — it’s really a little bit silly to try to argue Saddam Hussein was harmless. So people aren’t angry about the fact that Hussein was taken down, because he was a harmless guy. They’re angry Hussein was taken down because taking him down was a worthwhile thing that some brave, but ordinary, people did. That really gets in the craw of some among us. And that’s the truth.
Now, if you’re one among those “googooders” as Mike Royko used to call them, here, via Boortz, are some places where you can raise your kid. Notice how eager these googooders are to share notes on this stuff. Again: When you aren’t doing anything with your life, you don’t want anybody else to do anything with theirs, and when you aren’t raising your kid to grow up to be someone with guts and courage and resourcefulness, you don’t want anybody else’s kid growing up that way either.
To give you a quick idea of how much location matters, consider this: Kids are six times more likely to die from a violence-related injury in Alaska than they are in Massachusetts. In California, public playgrounds must meet all federal government safety recommendations, but 34 states offer no standards for where your kids climb, jump and swing. Connecticut and 20 other states have made big improvements in school-bus crossings, while 13, including Nebraska and Arizona, are way behind.
Location, location
1. Connecticut
2. Rhode Island
3. New Jersey
4. New York
5. California
6. Maine
7. Pennsylvania
8. Mass.
9. Maryland
10. Oregon
Oh, joy! Enough rules to crumple into a big ball and choke a horse to death! Or at least you could…if it wasn’t a federal crime to choke horses to death on things. And my Golden State is number five!
Of course, as any knuckle-dragging red-state real-man daddy like me knows, there’s a lot more to raising a boy into a man than just making sure he reaches Age Eighteen healthy and alive and whole. Us guys know that…but unfortunately, some eighty-eight years ago we went and gave them womyns the right to vote, and wouldn’t you know it the uppity females done gone out and started doing it. Now we have taxes up the ass…and rules rules rules, you can’t drive anywhere over thirty miles an hour because of those damn roundabouts, and in a few years you won’t be able to buy a car that can go that fast because we’ll have used the “carbon emissions” excuse to yank real cars off the road.
But our pwecious babums is going to be all safe. Won’t know how to do a God damn thing, but they’ll be safe.
Now you know the common thread. The common thread is — that people are cattle, and really aren’t worth anything. They shouldn’t be taught anything, they shouldn’t be raised to deal with danger, they aren’t worth defending, they can’t achieve anything and if they can, they should never be given the opportunity to do it. Might as well seal the damn things up in a great big jar and poke some holes in the lid.
This explains why when you face off against someone who insists we never should have taken down Saddam Hussein, and you ask well what should we have done instead — you don’t get anything. Just a deer in the headlights look, maybe a few stammering statements about George Bush being a really bad guy and his grandfather was connected to Nazis. Nothing about what to do. These people don’t come from the Land Of Do. They’re all about being, not doing…being…uh…well, happy. There’s nothing more in their lives than just that. So they don’t want anything more in your life than just that.
Funny thing is, though, when it comes to the anti-defense plank — they do think some folks are worth defending. Just the bosses. The kingpins of society. And you probably thought they were egalitarians, didn’t you?
I beg to differ. They’re aristocrats through and through. Earls Lords and Dukes are worth defending…Vicounts, Barons and anyone lower than that, are not.
Mr. Heller, the good guy in DC v. Heller, delivered one of the best slapdowns we’ve ever read when asked about the “safe streets” of DC:
At that point, a reporter interjected: “The Mayor (DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty) says the handgun ban and his initiatives have significantly lowered violent crime in the District. How do you answer that, Mr. Heller?”
The initial answer certainly wasn’t expected – Dick Heller laughed. Ruefully.
Pointing at the Mayor who was making his way across the plaza, surrounded by at least six DC police officers, Heller said, “The Mayor doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t walk on the street like an average citizen. Look at him; he travels with an army of police officers as bodyguards—to keep him safe. But he says that I don’t have the right to be a force of one to protect myself. Does he look like he thinks the streets are safe?”
There was no follow-up question.
We bet there weren’t.
The anti-achievement anti-defense subjects have that in common too. The Wizened Elders who run our Bottle City are worthy of protection…we low-life scum, are not. They don’t think they’re worth it, and so they don’t think anybody else is worth it either.
Not unless you have six bodyguards or more guarding your pampered ass.
So you see, opposing the right to defend oneself and one’s family, opposing the privilege of driving to get somewhere in time, opposing the natural exigencies of life…ends up being, quicker than anyone imagines, opposing life.
These are the same blue-state numb-nuts who want good-lookin’ women to wear short hair and be fully clothed all the time. Like wearing a bunch of damned burqas. Hey, nuts to you. Here, choke on this:
Self-reliance. Achievement. Self-defense. Supporting what makes life possible, and makes life worth living. And, good-lookin’ girls with long hair in skimpy clothes. Stuff that real men like. That’s what America is all about. It is the American way.
This ultra-pasteurized version of lowercase-l “life”…this continent called “Europe” seems to be cultivating a rich culture in supporting that. Seems to be something like growing sea monkeys in bleach, but if that’s what toots the horn of my fellow lowercase-a “americans,” I suggest they move the hell there. Stop trying to turn this place into that place.
And take your stinking round-abouts with you.
It cannot be denied, by anyone who’s paid the slightest bit of attention, that all these crazy left-wing agendas are part of something much, much larger. I demonstrate this through the eight-or-nine-in-ten rule. Show me ten war protesters, I can show you eight-or-nine abortion advocates. Eight-or-nine people who don’t believe in God. Eight-or-nine people who think “global warming deniers” are on par with holocaust deniers, eight-or-nine people who think we should interrogate our terror suspects by simply feeding them, letting them sleep, and waiting endlessly for them to decide to tell us something good — no interrogations.
This nonsense is all connected.
And nearly all of it is much more popular in other countries, than it is here in the USA. The planet, minus America, does things more-or-less the way they want it done. But that isn’t good enough.
Rick was observing the way they run away from an argument, out in cyberspace where nearly every fight is make-believe. The subject of the argument? The whole “turn away the Marines, people are frightened of military stuff” thing. Okay so these people are afraid of defense, but not offense. It could be summed up as: People don’t kill people, armies and guns kill people. Are military units made up of people? Sometimes, but other times not. The answer to that one switches back and forth based on political convenience.
Ann Coulter notices the incredible success these lunatics have had in taking over the one place where their policies prevail only partially, which is our country, now running three liberal media constructs as the only three viable candidates for President. Mmmm…for idealogues who like to talk about “diversity,” they don’t seem to be very much into it. I’m not sure what taking over an entire planet has to do with diversity. Maybe they want to make sure everybody can just see how they do things, and decide for themselves how incredibly smart the liberal-secular-anti-gun way of living is? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Just run one of ’em up against some opposition, like Rick did, and see how they react to it.
No, they’re control freaks. They just want everything done their way — period. They aren’t all about presenting us with alternatives, they’re about taking them away.
In the last year, the USD has lost value against the Canadian dollar. Canadians who are pre-disposed toward the anti-carbon anti-God anti-death-penalty anti-self-defense anti-common-sense way of life — but I (mostly) repeat myself — recognize this as an extremely powerful argument: To build a society enshrining the ideals you favor, right alongside another society enshrining ideals you do not. And then show how incredibly prosperous you are. They know how persuasive this is. Believe me, I can vouch for this personally, you’ve never seen anybody quite so full of themselves.
So with nine tenths of the globe doing things the way they want, how come they don’t practice that a little bit more? Maybe build some artificial islands. One off the coast of Oregon, one off of North Carolina, one off of Maine…make countries out of each and every one of them. No guns, no death penalty, no religion allowed. And then they can all surround the United States and watch us go down the tubes, with our foolhardy practices of faith, inalienable rights, respect for the individual, private charities over public social programs, and law, and justice. Just grab a bag of cheese curls, watch us flouder around with our prehistoric ways. And point. And laugh.
(Just don’t forget to pay that tax on your television set.)
What’s this drive to stamp out every last tincture of any idea contrary to your own, in the name of “diversity”?
My own attitude about gun rights is pretty much echoed, word-for-word, here:
To maintain that the Second Amendment does not guarantee an individual right, one has to assume that the Founders, in writing a Bill of Rights meant to safeguard individuals from government power, used “the people” in the Second Amendment to mean government power — state militias — and exclude individuals, yet they meant “the people” to mean individuals in the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments — as well as the Tenth, which specifically distinguishes between “the states” and “the people.”
The editorial continues with another great point…
True also, the awkward wording of the Second Amendment has confused a great many: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Some read the opening clause as restricting the scope of the rest of the sentence. But consider a similar sentence: “Because a well-fed army is necessary, the right of the people to grow and eat crops shall not be infringed.” It would be silly to read that sentence as meaning only the army can grow and eat crops, or that all crops must be turned over to the army for consumption.
I would add, further, that this has always seemed obvious to me. I never did turn into an argumentative little butthole about it until sometime…can’t remember when, between the sixth and ninth grades. Up until then I had agreed with that “opening clause” fiasco; it does seem to introduce ambiguity. But at that point I had come to realize this five-word juxtaposition “the right of the people” resolves any such ambiguity. Completely. It’s preposterous to try to argue any such ambiguity remains. Not only that, but those five words, to me, seem to be designed to resolve that ambiguity.
“Hey you guys, in a couple hundred years they might think ‘the right to keep and bear arms’ has something to do with the right of …I dunno, some state government, maybe the feds. We’d better get specific and say the right of the people so nobody gets confused about it, whaddya say?”
“Hey Tom, that’s a great idea. Wish I’d thought of it.” “Gosh I dunno…can’t some things be assumed?” “Well, you never can be too careful, let’s go ahead and put it in. If it’s needed later, great, if not, no big loss.” “I guess you’re right.”
So fast-forward to today…and whether some folks like it or not, it says “right of the people.” That is what it says.
I’ll stop now, since I’m reduced to just editorializing about whether or not something says what it plainly says, which is silly. But don’t worry. Crazy as it demonstrably is, someone is still going to find a way to disagree.
Might as well argue with the sun coming up.