This piece was originally written 5 June 2006, when legislation was being considered to make ethnic Hawaiians a “protected group.”  The whole business of protected groups is very much still with us in American life and politics.

Back in the early 1980′s, our family business had an ongoing business relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Getting there in those days from the U.S. wasn’t straightforward; it was necessary to pass through Tokyo on the way to Beijing. This involved a layover at Narita, an airport the subject of the longest running violent opposition of its kind in modern times.

Those who travel by air know that sitting in airports waiting for flights is pretty much a given. So while waiting to get on the plane for Beijing, I sat in the airport lobby and looked around my fellow passengers. Of particular interest were a group of “oriental” looking teenagers who were drawing attention to themselves by the noise they were making. So I asked myself, “where are these people from? And why do they, looking like they do, act like this?” (I had come to expect better in my travels to East Asia.) The giveaway finally came when they started to throw their American passports at each other and their hapless chaperones scolded them, “You’re going to China, you’d better behave!” Closer examination showed that these young people were from the William McKinley High School in Honolulu; as their school’s band, they were going to China to perform.

Today we have the spectacle of at least some of these people being made into yet another “special” ethnic group, together with all of the “privileges” that go with that. This balkanisation of our population is getting one more division, and that in a place which is mostly non-white and which has a high rate of racial mixing. It’s one thing to impose this in areas where a form of “apartheid” had been constructed by the “white” majority. It’s quite another to do this in a place like Hawaii. So what gives?

Let’s start by stipulating that the tropical and sub-tropical fringes of the US stretch what it means to be “American.” (I know this: I grew up in one.) Beyond that, the whole idea of the US is not an ethnic expression but an idea, an idea based on the God-given rights of its people. One of the main jobs of the government is to insure that these rights are guaranteed to its people in an equitable fashion.

Unfortunately that dream has been lost in in the invasion of “modernist” identity politics. In the rapid rate of change that characterises our time, people want to hold on to whatever identity they have, and the most fundamental human identity they have is that of their ethnic origin. The flip side to this is the assertion by some that they are some kind of “master race.” This was of course a leitmotif of Adolf Hitler, who inflicted it with deadly seriousness during World War II. Other groups in the US have attempted to assert the same thing; they would be laughable if they weren’t backed up with bull-headed persistence and occasional violence.

This is why we have the system we do. Additionally making certain groups “special” is expedient politically because it creates a patron-client relationship between the group benefiting from it and those who make it possible.

So now we have the Hawaiians gunning for the same status. There are some powerful patronage issues here as well. In the short run these will benefit. But in the long run the result will be resentment by the rest of the population. The more groups that seek such status, the less “special” it will be. It will degenerate national life into a slugfest of competing interest and ethnic groups. The dream for unity and God-given rights will die, and the country’s own survival will be in doubt. The only thing that will mark us as Americans is our bad behaviour, as was the case with the McKinley students in the Tokyo airport lobby. We are further down that road than many of us realise.

A few years ago I was standing in another airport line talking with a high official in my church. He was making arrangements to go to South Africa to visit with our two churches there. Legal apartheid had been ended, and his job was to inform the two churches—one white, one “coloured”—that they either needed to come together or get out of our denomination. Years ago, liberals thought they would break Christianity by branding it as a racist affair, but the American church is beating that rap to create a true multi-racial unity. It may be the only multi-racial unity left standing if things keep going as they are.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

This was actually my first blog article, posted 14 April 2005.

After a hiatus, this past spring I found myself back teaching Civil Engineering at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This is an activity I find professionally and personally satisfying, if not financially.

During the hiatus, the campus had made some major technological changes. One of them enabled anyone on the UTC staff to spam the entire staff. Being a closed group, this meant that the staff could have a spam dialogue, with people being either participants or spectators in the process.

A bill had been introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly which would give students additional redress in the event they felt they had been downgraded by a professor became same faculty member didn’t care for the student’s views. This is primarily aimed at liberal faculty of the arts.

Needless to say, this piece of legislation got a cool response from the faculty. The surprise came from which part of the faculty; the most vociferous opposition came from evolutionists, who feared that another Scopes trial was in the making. Coming back at them were the new earth creationists, and this led to a long, generally informative but serious debate on the subject of creation and evolution.

I mentioned this to my state representative, who coolly responded that the faculty should have stuck to the subject matter at hand. For me, however, as a Christian, an old earth creationist, an adjunct and someone who deals with geological issues in Soil Mechanics, this was a perilous situation. If the evolutionists win, I get the boot over the origin of the universe and being a theist (the evolutionists are for the most part rabid secular humanists.) If the new earth creationists win, I get the boot over the age of the earth. Real academic freedom these days consists of forcing the administration to find really creative ways to give people the boot!

As the debate drug on, things started to get a little satirical, and one evolutionist mused that the state would endorse Lysenkoism for the teaching of biology. Paul Krugman made a similar statement in an column for the New York Times; evidently this is becoming a liberal talking point. But brining up Lysenko is a perilous business for secular humanists of any stripe.

The story of the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, his rise and those of his theories and the liquidation of his opponents, is a complicated one, but it basically involves a combination of genetic theory and Marxist ideology that resulted in science being thwarted by political considerations. The problem in bringing up a controversy from Stalin’s Soviet Union is that creationists are nowhere to be found. The regime that oversaw this purge (along with all of the others) was fuelled by the most important single secular ideology in human history–Marxism.

As was the case with both of the major ideologies that turned the twentieth century into a bloodbath (the other was of course fascism,) Marxism drew a great deal of inspiration from Darwin’s work. Both Marx and Engels (especially the latter) were committed Darwinists. When Marx died in 1883, Engels pronounced at his graveside “just as Darwin discovered the law of the development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” Marxism was “scientific” socialism, as opposed to the “utopian” kind popular in Europe at the time. At the same time Lysenko was running like a bull in a china closet through the Soviet biological establishment, Stalin’s regime was attempting to destroy belief in God throughout the country by killing or sending believers to gulags and blowing up churches, a result that many secular humanists probably find satisfying.

After all that, though, we have a situation where a “scientific” regime not only stymies research for ideological reasons; it now gets pilloried by secular humanists with short memories! The whole story of Marxism is a reminder that it’s easy to turn any system of thought–no matter how secular–into a religion when it comes time to force it on humanity. One of the things that bothers me about secular humanists, this debate included, is how they on the one hand tell us that the basis of science is “free inquiry” and then fanatically defend their dogmas when they are attacked.

With such contradictions, it’s hard to know whether one should take an ideology like secular humanism seriously outside of their access to power in our society. Such was the case with Marxism. At one time Marx got into a conversation with the wife of the publisher of Das Kapital in Germany about who would do the chores in Marx’s “new world.” It started light heartedly but turned serious, at which point the woman said, “I cannot picture you in an egalitarian period since your inclinations and habits are thoroughly aristocratic.”

“Neither can I,” Marx replied, “those times must come but we must be gone by then.”

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

This speaks for itself:

(You’ll need to get about 4 1/2 minutes into the video to get to that particular question and response.)

I’ve been predicting this kind of thing since before the election.  I’ve also observed that, as President, Barack Obama is caught in the middle on this.  As a liberal, putting these people on trial in effect moves forward the criminalisation of his political opponents, which is an ideal situation for him.  As chief executive,  he knows that such proceedings could be used against him and his officials if and only if the political winds reverse themselves.  To guarantee the latter won’t happen, he must make the former work completely, and that’s a big gamble, even in this current, one-sided political climate.

Note: make no mistake, proceedings such as this are very much “victor’s justice,” as has been the case since the end of World War II (see this piece on that subject.)

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

The Connecticut legislature, for the moment at least, throws in the towel on trying to restructure Roman Catholicism:

State legislators have tabled for the rest of the session a controversial bill that would have mandated changes in the corporate structure of parishes and institutions affiliated with the Catholic Church…

The proposed bill raised by the Judiciary Committee would have required Catholic parishes and other organizations to restructure much of the existing corporate management structure, replacing a system dominated by clergy and church hierarchical officials with boards of directors made up of lay members of their respective congregations. The changes, sought by members of several state parishes that have been rocked by financial scandal in recent years, would have shifted responsibility for financial and administrative management to the boards of directors and away from parish and diocesan officials, who they charge have been inattentive to their calls for reform.

Such a restructuring, if it passed constitutional muster (and that’s as dependent upon the idea of the judge as much as anything else,) could be applied to any centrally governed church, such as the Episcopal Church or–note this, Pentecostal friends–the Church of God.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

One of our more viewed pieces is Think Before You Convert, an overview of the pros and cons of Anglicans who are thinking about “swimming the Tiber” and becoming Roman Catholics.

It looks like we have yet another reason to think about it, because now we see that Rep. Mark Foley’s Maltese priest at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lake Worth did some things with the future Member of Congress that he can’t remember because of the drug-induced stupor he was in. He also did some things that he does remember, like teaching Foley some things “wrong about sex” and undoing the fly of another boy in the parish.

From a personal standpoint, such problems are too close to home because the two Catholic parishes I regularly attended in South Florida–St. Edward’s in Palm Beach and St. Thomas More in Boynton Beach–flank Sacred Heart in Lake Worth. (Click here for my reminiscence about my time at St. Thomas More.) I will say that I never had any bad experiences of this kind in either parish. But I was seventeen when I converted, and since my parish priests all looked up to me, that puts things in a different perspective. Perhaps that delay was the best thing of all.
It is the sacred duty of any man or woman who is called priest or minister to behave in a way that is reflective of the call from God that he or she has on her life. I have become hard to shock in my old age, but I find this kind of thing impossible to stomach, especially when it happened so close to home and during the time I lived “where the animals are tame and the people run wild.”

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

To order, and for more information, click here

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

One of the enduring fixtures of American politics is that elections are largely decided by a relatively small group of “independent” voters in the centre. Or at least that’s where we think they are. One of the great principles that such voters will enunciate is that they “vote for the man (and when called upon the woman) and not the party.”

On paper, this is admirable. The personal qualities of an individual in public office are crucial to their success. Some of these transcend party and ideology, although many do not. But this thinking in practice has too many pitfalls to be relied on for superior results in government.

To start with, most independent voters rely on the media for their ideas more heavily than, say, those ideologues on the left or right. This is scary in and of itself. No matter what you think of the bias of the media, the basic problem is that more often than not the mass media frequently does not understand what it is looking at when analysing a given situation, let alone a candidate for office. We discussed this problem in the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war earlier this year and it applies to just about everything the media touches.

Beyond this, however, it assumes that everything in government happens because of the direct orders of the elected officials. If we don’t like what our government is doing, we change its officials and they will in turn change the government to do things the way we like it. That’s the idea behind representative democracy, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, things in reality are a little more complicated than that.

To start with, our legislatures–state and federal–are divided along partisan lines. It isn’t the belief of the senators and representatives that gives control of the agenda to a certain leadership, but party affiliation. A good example of how an entire group of people can be sidelined by their party’s position is that of pro-life Democrats. They can be pro-life all they want but their party has hung its fate on abortion and they have no effective voice as a result, either in their party’s internal system or in the legislatures they control.

Beyond that, we have the spectacle of congressional staffers, who control a lot more of the course of legislators than the legislators care to admit. If the staffers are drawn from the pool of party activists who helped get the legislator elected–or somewhere else–the legislator’s votes will be affected by those staffers, because no legislator is able to understand each and every vote that he or she makes.

Finally we must turn to the most important group of the unelected–the myriads of appointments to federal and state positions. In addition to having a larger than average number of elected officials vs. appointed ones, American government has a large number of appointed positions which are filled at the will of the ruling party. Most of these are filled either because the person is a reliable activist or more commonly for patronage reasons. This insures that people appointed tend to reflect the controlling ideology of the party rather than the diversity of opinions that might exist amongst the majority legislators. This is especially true in the Baby Boomer era, with its deadly combination of political polarisation and control freak methodologies.

The blunt truth is that we don’t vote for just people: we vote for all of the officials that they can appoint. And those appointments are generally reflective of the ideological bent of their party.

Today many conservatives are disheartened by what the Republicans have been doing the last twelve years. Liberals are energised by that prospect. But it’s one thing to have a party that suffers from patronage issues; it’s quite another to have a party that not only lives for them but wants to expand the role of government (and thus the patronage) to more and more aspects of human life. That’s one thing to remember as we go to the polls not only to elect our executives and legislators, but all of the unelected people that go with them. Your vote counts a lot more than you think; use it wisely.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

The charge of treason against Adam Gadahn is a reminder that the line–and consequences–of pesonal choice is very thin, as we commented earlier.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Somehow we’re getting a bad case of “deja vu all over again” in the proposal to restrict Episcopal churches to simply bless people rather than actually marry them.

This, of coure, is the usual practice in Europe. We still think that the long-term objective of many gay rights activists–inside and outside of the Episcopal Church–is to end the church’s privilege of performing civilly valid marriages in the U.S. This is one way to get around having to have a religious exemption for those clergy who cannot, in good conscience, perform gay marriages. That is, of course, if they can get gay civil marriage to stick in the U.S…

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Although the press covers it as if it’s a total shock, North Korea’s nuclear test is anticlimactic. Everybody–well, almost–knew they were working on nuclear weaponry. Now it’s official.

The main loser in this blast is South Korea, and not just for the obvious reason. They have been obsessed with reconciling themselves with their northern bretheren for a long time, not only for reasons of kinship but because they wanted to eliminate and dependency upon the U.S.–whose troops in the present they resent–and Japan, whose troops in the past they resent. Now their idea that this would be attainable in the forseeable future has gone up in radioactive smoke.

Cold wars with really intrasigent communists (the Chinese are too practical to fall into that category) are endurance matches, one the U.S. won in in the 1980′s. South Korea needs to understand that. They need to get away from doing what we almost did in the Cold War and realise that they need to stay the course until the North’s economy implodes.

Turning to another debacle, we know that Henry Kissinger has been telling President Bush that he needs to do the same in Iraq. But Bush is dealing with an entirely different dynamic in the Islamicists he faces in the Middle East. As we have pointed out time after time, the Arab world tends to be centrifugal, and Bush needs to exploit this and quit fighting the last war.  But for those who still are, the rules are still the same.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites