George Will: ‘I’m quite confident that we’re going to rebel against this abusive government’

In an interview with TheBlaze in connection with the release of his new book, “A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred,” we spoke with columnist and author George Will on all things baseball and his unified theory of beer, and then moved on to the arguably more important topic of the state of the union, touching on everything from the American founding, Will’s affinity for the Tea Party, to 2016, to immigration.

Among other explosive comments, Will told us that he is “quite confident that we’re going to rebel against this abusive government…sooner or later arithmetic is going to force realism on us.”

There’s the old cliché that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Is there a time in world history that you think is most analogous to today, and what country do you think in that era represented America? In other words, are we in World War I, and America is the British Empire, or is this World War II, or are we Rome? I’m curious as to your thoughts.

Will: Well ever since at about the time of the American founding, Edward Gibbon wrote “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” people have been fascinated by the threat that democracies would decay; that history would be cyclical not linear; that decay and decline was inevitable; that the seeds of destruction were in particular regimes and particularly in democracies. And clearly the American founders worried about this. And Lincoln worried about it at Gettysburg, that the question was “Whether we shall long endure this form of government.”

I think that we’re in a period today comparable to the American founding period

So I think that we’re in a period today comparable to the American founding period in two senses:

FERALOCITY
Foreword

This will only interest those who have noticed something horrifically wrong which is darkening our collective societal/cultural vision, which is simultaneously eating away our national flesh like a malignant cancer, systemically collapsing and laying waste to the final vestiges of the foundational Judeo-Christian culture and traditions of the United States of America.

This process, which I have termed ‘Feralocity’, combines ‘feral’ and ‘velocity’; the former is a state of being and the latter a state of motion. Feral being that which is wild, untamed, unfettered by anything other than superior force, unapproachable, implacable and fierce. Velocity (under the definition of feralocity) is the speed of a societal/cultural change. Feralocity is unquestionably in a state of acceleration, its rate of change is increasing both in velocity and mass, much as a snowball or avalanche descending an increasingly steep slope.

The Modern Era, Post-Modern Era, and the current phase, the Obama Era is (within the Post-Modern Era) in itself, a study of Feralocity. We will juxtapose the “Obama Era” with the cultural, ethical, legal and moral decay that preceded Obama that was already in place. For the benefit of the few who still recall what this nation once stood for and defended with deepest conviction and faith, it is fervently hoped that the remnant few of the former generation(s) will not cease striving for what once was, and that they will do whatever they can do to persuade and educate what is almost certainly the most ignorant (not necessarily unintelligent) generation to ever be born into America.

The so-called “millennials” are not without excuse or defense. They are a generation lacking instruction. They should have been taught by their parents.

A student recently declared to me that he was an atheist (this was a 13 year old boy). I smiled and replied “your brain is not yet fully developed, I am sure you will re-visit your belief later”.

The Anti-Mahdi 2014

The Modern Era

The British historian Paul Johnson penned a tremendously influential and superbly crafted historical commentary (”Modern Times”) on the history of the West (primarily) and the interplay of the western civilizations with the eastern nations and empires beginning with the end of World War One (Or the Great War as it was called at the time). He begins to set the stage with an analysis of the trigger for the war, the main events and milestones of the war, but really gets into motion on the personalities and the outcomes of Armistice process, the Versailles Treaty which it produced, and the subsequent impact of numerous negotiations, agreements and treaties (to name a few, ‘Sykes-Picot’, the “White Paper”, the doomed “League of Nations” and that led, post-war to disarmament treaties-that had far reaching and nearly catastrophic effects on the balance of naval and military power affecting the UK, the Empire of Japan and the United States). ‘Modern Times’ spanned that seminal shift of the end of conflict through the era by which he titled his work to the 1980s. A subsequent edition was revised and published that brought us nearly to the end of the 20th century (1990’s).

[note: For the reader who would like to survey the full range of Johnson’s work (40 published works in all) , he also published histories of the British people, a history of the Jews, a history of America (an effort which I found curiously flat and certainly far inferior to other works), and one of the best collections of short biographic essays ever produced (that should be a companion reading to Modern Times) published as ‘The Intellectuals’.]

The Great War had produced a cultural hangover, cynicism, bitterness, and an undercurrent of rootless hedonism, nihilism and despair among the intelligentsia which in art, music and literature attempted to capture and even celebrate the ‘nothingness’ of the period following the war. We are shown the seeds of a massive shift that would influence new ideas of governance, social justice, education, economics, science and technology and what would be generally defined as the “highest good”. The immediate post-war era would birth a growing rejection of pre-war institutions, ethical and spiritual, that underpinned pre-war western ideas of public life. What was once accepted as good, or, what was not good or even bad/evil, and what was real and what was imagined were all in play. These deconstructionist movements were shifting and changing how people viewed themselves and their place in the larger society/world around them.

Johnson entertains as he develops the complex threads as they unravel from the previous fabric and assembles a new and strangely patterned structure that will give rise to the Spanish Civil War, Soviet expansion, the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, Mussolini’s Italy, and the rise of the Empire of Japan on the world stage.

America in this period of social upheaval and reliably brutal and murderous political and cultural revolutions, was described by Johnson as “Arcadia”. America, not immune to the vast changes in post war Europe and Asia, experienced the “Roaring Twenties” and its own period of excess and what seems by today’s standards, rather mild debauchery. At the same time, the American people were moving from the farms and villages into the cities and into the factories as the industrial scope and might of city and empire building was becoming a roaring economic and cultural movement driven by mass electrification, cheap abundant energy and water resources, and an explosion of international trade, road construction, rail and truck transport and cheap, reliable automobiles. Telephones and electrical power, the family radio set, and new work saving appliances would became standard features in the cities and began to spread even into rural America. Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as Ireland and Northwest Europe were streaming into the United States in the millions per year. All were determined to grab a piece of the American Pie and make it their own. They worked hard, their children worked hard, and they prospered and enriched a growing nation. The parents wanted to assimilate—often, children were forbidden to speak anything but English. The parents wanted their children to be American; un-hyphenated Americans. They endured challenges and discrimination but they never gave up and they achieved their goals. They loved America and did not bewail having left their homelands to be here.

Industrial production was growing at a rate that camouflaged an underlying steeply rising inflation, masking the fact that while worker production was doubling and trebling and then increasing ever higher, wages and prices remained fairly flat. The per worker output was steeply rising. The lower cost per unit of output through efficiencies realized by new technologies and methods, mass production and standardization, fantastic new machines and processes, all powered by abundant, cheap, steam and electrical power, absorbed the effect of the growing inflation of the money supply and gorged the bubble of a raging bull stock market. It was all hidden until it imploded. We read that Winston Churchill, at the advice of an American friend, was persuaded to invest a sizeable sum in the market, his friend having confidently assured him an unbelievable return and profit, lost everything he invested when it crashed.

Broadly speaking the Great Depression/collapse of the American stock market would begin October of 1929 and would last until the advent of World War Two. In the midst of the panic, the federal government, under both Hoover and Roosevelt would underwrite huge social, industrial and economic programs intended to kick-start the floundering economy. Projects like the Hoover Dam, each were engineering marvels, completed under-budget and under-time, were raising the bar of the possible to greater and greater heights.

Germany was first out of the gate in the race to economic recovery. It is interesting to note that the pre-World War II era produced the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini (El Duce) in Italy, Franco in Spain, and Stalin in the Soviet Union. An increasingly isolated and impotent emperor in Japan (Hirohito) was largely usurped by his army/prime minister Hideki Tojo who had support from Japan’s resource starved military and industrial sectors. It was also a time that witnessed the nascent beginning of Mao Zedong engaged in an ongoing civil war between the forces of Mao and the Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai Shek (both of which were at war with the expanding Empire of Japan on the Chinese mainland). In France, it produced Charles Degaulle, who post-WWII, would serve mainly to manage French decline as well as the loss of most of its colonial holdings, Algeria for one, being the most brutally sadistic revolution in history to that time.

This is not the time nor the place to summarize the WWII experience beyond broad trends. Allied victory established The United States as the premier world superpower, economically, militarily, and politically. A rival Soviet Union was aggressively expanding and consolidating its hold on Eastern Europe while China fell to Mao Zedong and became the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

The United Kingdom had spent itself into oblivion and was decimated by the demands of both World Wars and went into a bleak, fatalistic period of decline under recurring Left-Labor governments who were more engaged in the management of the retreat and piecemeal dismemberment of the British world empire, than they were in seeking to renew the UK’s leadership role in world affairs. This loss of national confidence and post-colonial backlash were both symptom and effect of a widely accepted, assumed sense of collective national guilt regarding the 19th century colonial expansionist policies prior to the second world war. Post-Winston Churchill’s stewardship of the UK (Churchill was an unabashed imperialist), the United Kingdom chose to abandon world leadership. In fact, by national policy, the UK would willingly diminish its leading place at the table to become just another nation state which would increasingly “lead from behind”. Does that sound familiar? The United Kingdom has consistently pre-established social and economic policies that the United States, under the leadership of the political Left in America, would later adopt as well.

Let it be noted here that among many effects and trends produced in the conflict of WWII and the subsequent re-drawing of world maps, there is one glaring aspect as it relates to the United States. US war policy in WWII was not to reach a negotiated settlement such as directed by President Wilson (the Father of Progressivism) with its allies and enemies as in WWI, but instead adopted a stated war policy of “unconditional surrender”. WWII was the last war the United States would ever win. The veracity of this milestone will be examined shortly. Suffice it to say that in every conflict since, Korea, Viet Nam, the Balkans, Lebanon, Afghanistan, IraqX2, and the so-called War on Terror, the American military has been suckered and betrayed. Strong words but true. War does not end when the enemy says “let’s talk truce”. It ends when the enemy says, please stop killing us; we unconditionally surrender and we will follow any laws, any written constitution you prescribe. And, if any of our people continue to attack you after we surrender, we will consider any action you take to make it stop as justified, right and appropriate, and we will support said actions unconditionally. We are done. All we want is to live in peace. We promise to hunt down and eliminate anyone who tries to break the peace by attacking you.

[note: 450,000 returned American veterans, far too many of which are maimed and blighted, disabled mentally and/or physically as the result of having been fed through the pointless meat grinders called Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 11 years (going on 13 in Afghanistan) while our “diplomats” and military and civilian “leaders” wring their hands over whether we are trying hard enough or doing the right thing to make the barbarous savages like us and stop trying to kill us. The Afghan leadership and people as well as the Iraqi leadership and people should be wringing their hands trying to figure out how to survive should we begin to do the things we did to Germany and Japan to ensure total victory for the US and its allies and total defeat for the enemy. The vast majority of the enemy casualties, military and civilian in both theaters are not caused by US military action but are caused by Muslims killing Muslims—that is a fact. You can look it up. Our sacred war veterans, all of them since the end of WWII, without question, have been betrayed, heartlessly so, by a government that has lost the confidence and the ability to wage war and achieve peace as a result. I thank all our veterans whenever and wherever I can. I am one. They know what I know; most of them do anyway. Yes, to the military forces who have served in all the post WWII conflicts, the old cliché’ goes like this: “it is what it is”.

The establishment of the State of Israel (in November of 1947 by UN decree) in May 1948 would both provoke and mark the expansion of Arab and Muslim socialist nationalism that would morph into a universalistic re-birth of Islam fundamentalism that is today under the influence and control of the Muslim Brotherhood, “Al Ikhwan” (C: 1924). The MB clearly states as their goal the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate to unite and rule all the Islamic community (Ummah) under one Caliph (Anointed successor to Mohammed and the Vicar of Allah on Earth). Newly liberated from colonial rule under many masters-France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, United Kingdom, the United States et al, the Muslim Arab nations (and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation-OIC) desired to eliminate the fledging Jewish state. This ever escalating conflict would, over time, in tandem with the challenges of the new “Cold War” with the Soviet Union, as well as the surrender of the US to the Chinese demand for full UN security Council membership, absorb the largest percentage of the attention, activities, and schemes to derail Israeli national aspirations, and would shape the anti-US and anti-Israeli findings and resolutions voted in both the UN General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.

The Arab nations attacked Israel in 1948 vowing to “drive them into the sea”, and suffered a humiliating defeat (called the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” by the Arabs) by a nation of barely 600,000 Holocaust survivors and “Sabras” (native-born Jewish Israelis in Palestine), who were armed with little more than small arms and a few propeller driven small aircraft and light artillery units. Israel would, in coming years, absorb the brunt of many conflicts; the first being the Suez War in 1956, which Eisenhower personally intervened in and unilaterally ordered the British, French and Israeli governments to disengage and return the Suez Canal to Egyptian Control. (Right or wrong as Ike’s command may have been, I would call that real power wouldn’t you?) This was followed in short order by the Six Day War in June 1967, the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, and the war in Lebanon in 1982. Israel is today poised for conflict with a rising Middle Eastern power, Iran, and with an increasingly bellicose and radicalizing former ally, trade and security partner of Israel, Turkey. Syria is in the midst of a civil war, Assad’s regime is backed by both Russia and Iran. The decade-long Turkish drift into Islamic Fundamentalism under Recep Erdogan’s AKP party, is a fermenting radical Islamist brew that the United States and Israel will have to deal with shortly (along with Iran and Russia). The finished product—a revived Islamic Caliphate— will, if unchecked by “moderating” influences, become an all-consuming world crisis in the very near term.

Yet, the Post WWII decades in Arcadia were an un-paralleled period of US leadership and unquestioned hegemonic supremacy. What happened?

This being an essay only, I cannot bring to bear a full book length treatise of what happened. But making milestones apparent and gauging the consequences of each may be sufficient to bring the picture into focus.

In the 1950’s the post-modern era was beginning to form even while American national unity and common purpose, what the Progressive Left would call the mindless conformity of the unenlightened masses (or, what we remember and loved as America), would begin to bear the brunt of repeated assaults from the Left, the sequence of each were deliberate, long imagined and documented. The Left was relentless and patient, in its methodical execution of goals and policies, and continues today to demonstrate a monolithic level of Left conformity of collective opinion that is both united and purposeful. The belief among the Left “The ends justify the means” has never abated nor has it ever morphed into a gentler, more benign paradigm (see note).

[note: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) formally ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union from communism was, in the end, an economic collapse inevitably caused by military over-reach and the inherent economic weakness of centralized planning. It has now been replaced by an Oligarchy currently headed and controlled by Vladimir Putin and after him (if ‘after’ ever happens), someone just like him will likely be waiting in the wings. Russia today is a mafia of crony capitalism at best, still buttressed by an imposing and far reaching control over the actions and thoughts of its citizenry, as well as the peoples of the CIS-Commonwealth of Independent States-nations that were newly separated from the Soviet Empire. The names, the phraseology, the spin may have changed but the wholesale theft of freedom and lust for power and empire remains largely intact. The KGB and GRU never went away, they just changed labels.]

Indeed, in Arcadia, President Truman in 1952 established a Day of National Prayer, which in 1988 President Reagan further established would recur annually on the first Thursday of May (see note).

[note: President Obama, not be outdone in his first year in office, just eight years and fourteen days following 9-11, while at war in two theaters against Islamic forces bent on our destruction, established 25 September 2009 as an Islamic National Prayer Day to be held in Washington DC.]

Yes, in the 1950s we had prayer in public schools, prayer was offered in convening federal, state and local governments, prayer was offered to convene public assemblies, before athletic events, Christian and Jewish displays in season and in public and private spaces. Even Hollywood produced Christian themed mega-budget movies, like “The Ten Commandments”, “Ben Hur” and over time many others through the decades; 1965’s The Greatest Story Ever Told” to Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ”. Hollywood also produced feel-good movies about WWII, Disney was nearing it’s apex in animation and live film of traditional American Classics. John Wayne was to appear in numerous classic John Ford Westerns that again, underscored character and integrity as winning over greed and thievery.

Norman Rockwell continued to produce iconic illustrations of the Arcadia dream and Readers Digest Condensed Books exploded in subscriptions and quantity, countless titles which underscored both the American experience and provided a universal level of access to superb fiction and non-fiction selections alike.

Bible class was part of the public school curriculum and public school music classes included singing biblically-based traditional Christian Hymns. Christmas and Easter occasioned countless re-enactments by school children across the nation of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—not Santa Claus centered and not about Easter Bunnies. The American public, young and old had a basic if not encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and the core elements of faith and salvation.
The Pledge of Allegiegance, fIrst written in 1892, was revised in 1954 when Congress officially added the words “under God” to the Pledge, so that it currently reads:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Yes, in the 1950’s America, movies were, overall, wholesome and the good guy always won. Television programming was reflective of Judeo-Christian based principles that buttressed family harmony and family values; hard work, honesty, and fair play. The popular media culture encouraged the young to engage in competition-train and practice to win, to do and be your best, in all things to discern right from wrong, never cheat, lie or steal, respect and obey all adults—especially teachers and pastors, police and firemen, and always, most importantly, show respect for, and obedience to, your parents. Indeed if you were ever lost or hurt and alone, you were instructed to find an adult, any adult, for assistance. You were taught to expect adults would reliably take you by the hand, brush you off if you had fallen and walk you home, or call your parents, or even give you a lift on the back of their pick-up or in their car. Today? Children are told to tell someone “in authority” if an unknown adult speaks to them. They are told to not trust strangers as they may molest them (and all too often, sadly, that is sound advice). But in the 50’s, well, you never really thought about such things. They were outside the norm, beyond the pale, and exceedingly rare.
If you were a boy in the fifties you would consider a pocketknife, slingshot (or “Wrist-Rocket” as one later brand was sold) and a Daisy bb gun, as “standard issue”. A sturdy bicycle would take you anywhere you wanted to go. In the fall season, with a sweet aroma of burning piles of raked leaves in every driveway, you would play “pig slaughter” with the neighborhood kids. Pig slaughter was basically Rugby without teams or rules or protective gear. In the winter you would rocket down hills on sleds, ice skate on frozen creekbeds, have snow ball fights at school and at home, build snow fortesses and defend them to the last flake. You would often get hurt a little, or occasionally a lot, but you did it anyway. You really did not know what all the girls did. The fun girls did the same stuff that boys did and with equal enthusiasm.
Children of the 50’s never heard of a “play-date” directed by their parents. We were well equipped to go out into the world and make our own friends and if necessary deal with, avoid or overcome our enemies i.e. bullies.
If you had a dog (we almost always did), the dog ran free with us and always returned home at dark just like we did. Why? To eat. We cleaned our plates because... we were hungry. “Picky” eaters are a relatively recent phenomenon.
If you were traveling abroad, your American Passport was practically a “get out of jail free card”. It put other nation’s citizens, businesses, governments and the bureaucracies thereof on notice—this is an American citizen; trifle with, annoy, cheat or abuse at your own risk. You don’t want us to come down on you or your country. Neither did they and they behaved accordingly (see note).
[note: Today, and for the last two decades or more, both American military members and American civilians are advised to lay low, be anonymous, do not give your identity away, try to look like everyone else and don’t speak to the locals. Would you call that a “sea change?”]
And, as a closing note, for at least the first half of the decade, if someone discussed “rock” it was either in science class or in a sermon about Christ and His Church.
But, in the middle of Arcadia, there was already a Leftist camel’s nose under the American tent. And the camel was hungry.

The Modern Era II
The Left Counter-attacks

There are so many opinions, so many beliefs, so much confusion, strife and bitterness between the “Right” the “Center” and the “Left”, one would assume this environment to be the result of ignorance, incompetence, and/or the willful abrogation of the Constitution of the United States as well as, the willful suspension of reality.

Any fair-minded person would generally applaud universal suffrage, child-labor reform, and a 40-hour workweek. These were reforms worthy of our support as a nation. What came with these reforms may not entirely meet muster however. Some people just work harder than others. Many people have worked 80 to 120 hours a week in order to found an enterprise and nurture its success, believing in the outcome their efforts would be rewarded. Ask any devoted mother how many hours she is willing to commit to raise a child from birth to independence. For that matter ask any devoted fathers how many hours they are willing to commit to the same outcome, an independent, capable, morally guided, human being, ready and willing to take on their adult responsibilities and to strive for the same outcome for their children as their own parents were willing to shoulder for their successes.

Life is hard. Americans once taught their children that life is hard. There is no easy path. Work, and only work, will provide for life in a world that is not easy and in which no guarantees exist. At whatever level of education, skills (the trades for instance) technical acumen (information technologies), inventiveness (the next big thing!) children were aware that they must choose well, because they were taught they were responsible for the choices they made. Some entered the military to learn skills, leadership, and to discover within themselves the virtues of courage, integrity, honor, and discipline. Many followed in their parent’s footsteps becoming doctors, nurses, plumbers, electricians, steelworkers, miners, truck and rail transportation workers, or public servants like police and fireman, or builders, carpenters, roofers, architects, “captains of industry” and so on and on. The athletic child may pursue the success and prestige of achieving status as sports heroes. The musically gifted may become successful writing and performing as recording artists and live life large. Other budding artists may reap fame and fortune in the medium of visual arts, film, painting, photography and sculpture. Some would work in factories, some would work in service industries, some would compete in retailing careers. Others sought government employment in any of the countless alphabet soup agencies of local, state, and federal governments.

The options were many for the children of the Post-W II 40’s and 50’s, and many if not the great majority “made the cut” and became the vaunted and fabulously unique Boomer Generation now passing from the American scene today.

The Boomer Generation produced Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Bill Ayers (unrepentant leader of the 60’s Marxist terror organization, The Weatherman) and disbarred lawyer (convicted of perjury) and impeached but not convicted in the US Senate, President Bill Clinton.

Where and when were the foundations of America eroded and how and why is the question. Where are the markers, the trail, the spoor of the Left as it sought to fundamentally transform America? There are so many it is a challenge to know where to begin to catalogue the death by a million cuts inflicted by the Left that America has endured. Graphs and charts exist that measure both incline and decline, economic as well as societal and cultural.

The natural narcissism of persons who seek political power is a factor as well. The desire to provide “public service” as an inducement for the rough and tumble blood sport of politics is unlikely the sole driving force that motivates one to seek high office whether elected or appointed. This is as true of the government/military complex as it is of any leadership role in industry or finance. The money is good, the power is better, the corruption of power is universal. If you are not a millionaire before you attain high elected or appointed office, you will be before you leave. But, the ultimate intoxicant is, evidently, the power. The ability to change the status quo and the desire to make a mark in history is evident from Councilman to Legislator to Governor to President. Everything must have a moniker, an ism, a monument, bridges, buildings, parks, facilities, or venues that are tied to the names of those who claim the credit for their existence.

We will soon look at the negatives that were introduced in America, which began to downgrade what America was via the charts. For now, let’s look at the philosophies and hypocrisies of those who claim the credit and those who must, in fairness, shoulder the blame for what we have become.

In 1952, America was stunned by the successful Soviet Union launch of a small, primitive, beeping spherical satellite (about two feet in diameter) into a low-earth orbit. Unintended consequence: President Eisenhower deduced that science and math education were not given enough emphasis and, that since Soviet schools taught Darwin’s Theory of Evolution where we did not, therefore Eisenhower directed (and funded) that evolution would be taught in all public schools and universities.

Simply put, Evolution supplanted Creation and the results were catastrophic. The effect was far beyond the child who finally gleaned that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy were happy constructs fed to them as real but turned out to be lies. Now, the only source, the foundation of America, the source for all common law both in England and in America, the Bible, was no longer reliable. The Bible was repudiated. What was once evident from study of the geologic record of the Earth (Catastrophism) was replaced by Gradualism (geologic and life forms change over eons, at first millions of years, then billions of years)

In the celebrated film, “Rebel Without A Cause” circa 1955, actor James Dean and his High School classmates on a field trip to the local Planetarium, are given a droning, lifeless, presentation, of a purposeless, God absent, God not needed, universe, that will one day cease to exist, inferring that all that one may live, experience, and do, are pointless, one path is as useless as another. It is a film about the angst of a young man yearning for meaning and finding none, who finds himself embroiled in a gratuitous conflict that is resolved in the end with two pointless, accidental deaths. As much as anything can derail a young life, the idea that life itself is a meaningless existence was gaining traction in American culture, increasingly fed by academia, film, art, and literature.

The “Catcher in the Rye” also captured the pointlessness, if not idiocy, of the adult world through the eyes of an adolescent Holden Caulfield. It was argued at the time whether or not The Catcher in the Rye was an example of the “Great American Novel” in the genre of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”. In any event, The Catcher in the Rye further dismembered and marginalized extant American culture, diminished the capacity and role of parenting, and questioned whether life itself had any meaning.

We saw the birth of the Beatniks. Coffee house poetry readings, candle lit amidst clouds of tobacco smoke, bleak and banal as they were, demonstrated the desire to connect with a new paradigm and to explore it. A new and militant Atheism jogged alongside with “Universalist” notions of a God that is not personal but absentee, that “exists” in everything, but without name or even function. The new prophets claimed to access a state of spiritual self-awareness and a potential god-likeness that all men could attain through self-effort. Seemingly esoteric knowledge, having no foundation other than the imagination of man, was beginning to supplant the true transcendent traditions of Judeo-Christian worship and study.

And who can forget Madeline Murray O’Hair? Texas Bar Exam failure, lifelong atheist and founder of the American Atheists. In sum, in 1995 at the age of 76, after a lifetime of agitation to remove all reference to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to Jesus Christ, specifically to the Bible as well as to prayer in school, or any public forum, she was kidnapped and murdered and dismembered along with her son Jon Murray, and granddaughter Robin Murray O’Hair. A former administrative worker at the office of the American Atheists, David Roland Waters, was found guilty of the crime. Evidently, God will not be mocked. Later, charts would show the effect of her signature accomplishment, the Murray v. Curlett lawsuit, which led to a Supreme Court ruling ending official Bible-reading in American public schools in 1963. This came just one year after the Supreme Court prohibited officially sponsored prayer in schools in Engel v. Vitale. O’Hair had attempted to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1954 but was denied entry by the authorities. She sought admission because she wanted to live in a country that was atheist by state law and policy. Had the USSR let her in we may have been spared these rulings in the 1960’s.

Margaret Sanger (Founder of Planned Parenthood) was a pioneer in contraceptives only, and was opposed to abortion on two fronts, the first being the risk to the mother, the second being opposition on moral grounds that the taking of an innocent and defenseless life was wrong. She looked to liberate women from unwanted pregnancies through prevention via contraceptives only. After her death, the organization she founded, Planned Parenthood, went far beyond Sanger’s position to advocate for, and win in most cases, abortion on demand as a woman’s “reproductive rights” negating the Constitutional right to life in favor of the perceived convenience of the mother or the state.. Sanger’s life work has been sullied as a result. She was not an advocate, as has been charged, of euthanization of “unfit” people. She did think that sterilization of genetically mentally deficient persons was a last ditch solution to a bad situation. She did write in opposition to Eugenics as practiced by Nazi Germany. Other academics of the time were whole-hog in with support for the Nazi’s genocidal positions and practices.

For every good effect of her work there were unintended consequences. Sanger was, in her own belief system, and her own views, what would be called a prude. She was dismayed and revolted by masturbation (by women who tearfully recited to her their inability to stop), Sanger advised that sex within stable and committed relationships was healthy, but promiscuity was not. She also was gladdened by a colleagues work to de-stigmatize homosexuality, although she was not an expert in the field of study.

Net effect, Sanger’s work was mal-appropriated and largely negated by more militant feminists and activists that would, much to her dismay, had she lived to see it, promote positions she had never held, and would turn abortion in the 1970’s into an industrial scale “Murder Incorporated”. Sanger did not deny abstinence as ineffective, only that abstinence was not able to fully address the issue of when and where and why to have children. She was the seed, murder was the harvest.

Jean Paul Sartre. What else does one say? Sartre was a wordsmith, with an ego unbounded by any form of decency, an iconoclast who seemingly reveled in having nothing to offer to anyone, for any reason, at any time. It was beyond him to be concerned for the life of another other than momentary self-interest. Sartre would have bored the hell out of me in less than five minutes. Juvenile, petulant, uninteresting to any but the most self-absorbed miscreant. His acolytes sought to laud and celebrate their supposed utter dissolution and self-imagined separation and isolation from members of their own species. Unfortunately, Sartre is assigned as reading for the purpose of producing “papers”; the papers to be composed by students, among whom, often, the most affected are those of less than nimble mind and lacking intellectual rigor, who will reliably parrot Sartre’s absurdities, tragically adopt the alienation and the posturing of a cowardly cry-baby who simply could not seem to be able to deal with life. So the “student” also condemns life, responsibility, relationships, and accountability as well as all the dullards who live and act in the orbit of normalcy. The net effect on the fifties and beyond would be negligible had not popular print and broadcast media re-urinated the ranting of an ultimate poseur in shallow overview, but done so in a sufficiently titillating manner that would provoke and encourage a “Look at me, I’m so alienated” imitation. Oh, regrettably many of these not quite bright students would go on to become professors at your own children’s university. Too bad for them, worse for you.

I will not waste time on the advent of Rock and Roll. It swept up almost all of us, the music, the free sex, the drugs, the rebellion, and the rejection of what provided the necessary ingredient to a rebellion—a normative rational society (you have to rebel against something that exists in order to have a rebellion).

While Rock and Roll was seducing the breakdown of normative values, there was a concurrent explosion of knowledge across every sphere of inquiry dealing with the real world, how to break it down, ways to understand and to exploit newly gained knowledge to improve lives. Co-incident to the comforts and conveniences of modern technology, science, medicine, transportation, production and distribution, there would continue to exist an absolute knowledge of, and faith in, a transcendent God, Creator of all that is.

But, but, but, God is Dead! He died in 1966. You can look it up—Time Magazine cover story. According to German philosopher Nietzsche, God died in 1887 “Gott Iss Tot” . Well, that should come as a relief to anyone who would normally feel compelled by their own conscience to believe, and subsequently, behave otherwise should God somehow not have died. I wonder what took the Time Magazine staff so long to realize the death of God?

This was the bitter swill being served up to a faith-confessing nation like the United States of America. Over time, it is a clear case of cause and effect. This is not a game of Clue and it’s not Mr. Mustard in the pantry with a lead pipe.

More later...

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