But even Kennedy’s motto left uncomfortably dangling the source of whatever it was that people ought to do for their country. Was it God? Was it the coordination of government? Was it some sort of sentimentalism?
Hammer hits nail on the head....Great piece.
However, stirring just often enough to smooth out the eddies of disruptive events was the essential cooking technique for the winning chefs.
Good commentary, Lloyd. I’m not surprised you had strong parents.
ping
I think this author’s got it backwards. Obama is a symptom of the cultural mindset he describes, not a cause of it.
I think it should be noted that there is little conservative about this sentiment, in the American sense of the term.
American conservatives do not build their lives around promoting their country.
It is not a separate entity that is or should be the center of an American's life. That's state worship, and it verges on fascism.
Which is not to say the country doesn't sometimes require defending against attack.
JFK was plagarizing Cicero here. The Romans did worship Roma, in a very literal way.
The kind the Founding generation tried to warn us about.
By equality, in a democracy, is to be understood, equality of civil rights, and not of condition. Equality of rights necessarily produces inequality of possessions; because, by the laws of nature and of equality, every man has a right to use his faculties, in an honest way, and the fruits of his labour, thus acquired, are his own. But, some men have more strength than others; some more health; some more industry; and some more skill and ingenuity, than others; and according to these, and other circumstances the products of their labour must be various, and their property must become unequal. The rights of property must be sacred, and must be protected; otherwise there could be no exertion of either ingenuity or industry, and consequently nothing but extreme poverty, misery, and brutal ignorance.
St. George Tucker, View of the Constitution of the United States , 1803.
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Another spot=on and excellent piece by Marcus. Thanks for posting.
Unspoken? Not in my house...
There is a parallel here — Kennedy and Obama are both creations of the media. As they used to say in TX — all hat and no saddle.
There is a parallel here — Kennedy and Obama are both creations of the media. As they used to say in TX — all hat and no saddle.
Good essay.
Sad times we are living in.
I’m glad to see Lloyd writing this, because according to Thad Cochran and his democrat supporters in Mississippi, reminiscing about the past and believing it was better than today is an obvious code word for racism; those who utter such longings, according once again to the pressitudes writing about that Mississippi race, are actually desiring to go back to the days of Jim Crow and white supremacy, I kid you not!
I suppose they’ll simply say Lloyd is an Uncle Tom who wants to be put back into second-class citizenship, but really, those who make such claims are idiots and the argument is slanderous and mockingly sophomoric.
All people long for the days of their youth, and reflect back on better times. Much of it is myth, as they forget the worse of those days, but some of it is true, and to attribute the motive to racism, is, well, racist, as if the better days were only better due to Jim Crow.