Dreck And Twaddle

Elections are evidence that both pandering to personal self-interests and appealing to every bodily organ but the brain are effective strategies. Politicians who are able to camouflage their desire for power in altruistic catch-phrases that appeal to emotion, ignorance, and naïveté are usually going to be victorious over those who tell the hard realities… a.k.a. the Truth.

What are the motives—the impulses—that induce citizens to vote? If we start with the most sublime inducement, we would probably argue that “it” is a personal sense of national duty. Many persons consider voting to be a responsibility of citizenship and a right of all citizens in a Republic. And a percentage of these persons make their own material interests subordinate to the collective, national interest. They reason that what is best for the nation is best for them, even if sacrifices are required in the short term.

Unfortunately, as we live through tortuous, political campaigns, we are reminded of the cautions of George Washington, John Adams, and others with prescient foresight that the formation of political parties would inevitably create internecine antagonisms, caused by avarice and ambitious self-interest.

Adams understood human nature because he measured his own strengths and weaknesses. He warned the nation at its inception: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”

There is little doubt that what political parties mean by United, we Stand is that the Party must be united, not the Nation. So the slogan of the Party should really be Divided we Stand, and to Hell with the Nation.

Beneath all, I believe, is the reality that America has deteriorated into the moral anarchy that has swept through Europe like a plague. Were Alexis de Toqueville to return to examine the United States witnessing the change, he would without a doubt strongly express that the spiritual foundation—the cornerstone of America—is in dangerous disrepair.

And to what can we attribute this disrepair? G.K. Chesterton wrote: “If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the strengthening of minor morals.” America, to its detriment, has set aside Godly morality and worships politically correct moralism.

Two things, I believe! A colossal failure in public education, and a libertine arrogance that demands, as do petulant children, its own way. The students lack order and control. The teachers are narrowly educated, and great teachers are hamstrung by cowardly administrators who fear the ACLU more than they fear God almighty.

I read, recently, some examples of the iconoclastic ignorance and arrogance. One comes from that group of know-it-all adolescents—college students—who believe themselves of such superior knowledge and intellect that we have to admit our provisions of subsidized education for them as a flagrant waste of money, casting pearls before swine.

An article from Reuters headlined “Students at Orange Coast College Ban Pledge of Allegiance.” The lead tells us that “Student leaders at a California college touched off a furor by banning the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings, saying they see no reason to publicly swear loyalty to God and the U.S. Government.”

In a display of mindless ignorance, student trustee Jason Bell declared “Loyalty ought to be something the government earns through performance, not through reciting a pledge.” This is, to quote Troutdale, Oregon’s Bob Bents, “dreck and twaddle.”

I recently attended the naturalization of a very intelligent woman from the Ukraine, and I listened as she took “The Oath of Citizenship:”

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

The cacophonous student Bell, a toxic tocsin, is clearly ignorant of history.

Then, the dissonantly clanging student Bell tells us what it is he wants from America to earn his allegiance. “That ‘Under God’ part is sort of offensive to me. I am an atheist and a socialist, and if you know your history, you know that ‘under God’ was inserted during the McCarthy era directly designed to destroy my liberty.”

Bell’s dreck and twaddle is about as ignorant and arrogant as it gets. His lack of historical awareness can be, if we are charitable, credited to an arrested cerebral development and the influence of the culture that has pervaded America—the “Great I” heresy.

Now though one can find some excuse for Bell, how does one account for the ignorance of Rosie O’Donnell, T.V. hostess and icon of the pop-culture? Rosie pontificated in her typically shameless “shoot from the hip” manner, “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam…. Don’t fear the terrorists. They are mothers and fathers.”

When the ignorance of such as Bell and “Rosie” become axiomatic and go unchallenged out of a misguided notion that one idea is as good as another, then America is on the verge of irreversible decline and fall.