Sunday, June 12, 2011

Review of new David Mamet book on the dismantling of American culture by Red State commenter

.
You know, "Thomas Jefferson owned slaves."...

6/8/11, "The Rot Amongst Us," by dajeeps

"If ever I thought I understood the depth and breadth of the problems we face as a country, I am now convinced, after reading The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture by David Mamet, that I didn’t know the half of it. I picked this book up because Liberals do, say, and believe such that is inexplicable by any kind of logic that I am as yet aware, even discussing contradictory concepts as if they were in perfect harmony, and I was hoping it would explain it to me in a way that I could understand.

I can say, without a doubt, for the sake of preserving my sanity and a slight glimmer of optimism that the next election might solve many things - I wish never saw this book. It scares the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of me.

The crux of it is that Liberalism is a complex twist of fantasies that when implemented into public policy individually over time result in the breakdown of everything that sustains us. There is no logic to the madness, and because there is no logic, there is no way to point out failure to them. The obvious failure of one fantasy-turned-public-policy simply leads to the development of another and so on.

The author explains how Liberals never make a habit out of thinking for themselves, most are never taught to do so. As a result, they never look beyond the surface of any issue, nor are they willing to examine alternative points of view for merit because (a) it takes too much energy and they do not like real work and (b) they are rewarded only when they give the answer that the other Liberals around them want to hear. So no matter the content of the alternate point of view, they always arrive at the same conclusion: Thomas Jefferson owned slaves – and slavery is bad, so everything Thomas Jefferson did is bad, or something of the like.

Perhaps this knowledge of Liberalism would not seem so terrifying if it were not pervasive throughout our entire society from public elementary schools to Ivy League institutions of “higher learning” (I prefer the term institutions of brainwashing and pavlovian conditioning). Why else would these graduates of Harvard Business School, in collusion with government, be running our financial system into the ground based on the fantasy that housing prices could only continue to explode? The realization is, however, that the only continuous explosion going on is what’s left of the U.S. economy after their fantasy collapsed. But that was not Liberalism that caused this, of course not –

  • because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.

This rot is everywhere. I am finding it even in places that I did not suspect. My husband’s grandmother, for instance, who has been very conservative on every other issue, sat across from me this evening and complained about being a “notch baby.” I had never heard the term before and I asked her what she meant. She said that people who were born in a certain time period of five years do not get the same amount from Social Security as people who were born either before or after this five year window because Jimmy Carter did not give them a raise. She told me that some group was working on getting a lump sum settlement of $5k each. I asked her where that money would come from. She said “the government.” I said, “Nope, it comes from him!” pointing to my son who just turned 15 two days ago.

Now, I do not necessarily recommend this kind of exchange for the slight of heart – in the communal area of an assisted living setting no less. I do not believe that she will ever speak to me again, or that any of those within an earshot would ever welcome me back to their home. All I can say is that in the span of not more than a moment I made a choice that someone had to say it.

And that is just it. Someone with a high profile has to tell the cold hard truth. We cannot continue to put leaders out there who water it down just to try to give people who have their head in the sand the idea that they can keep it there without cost. Everything government does is just a choice of trade-offs between who will be hurt to in order to benefit someone else and so many have been fooled into thinking that there is no cost or whomever ends up paying, though they really are not aware of who that is in any definite sense, deserves to be hurt. The truth is that it hurts us all as a nation, and that hurt is readily apparent in the faces of our friends and neighbors who are now unemployed because their employer was taxed and regulated out of business by the State, they cannot find another job because there are very few, can no longer keep up with their bills, cannot sell their house because there are no buyers, and are stuck in economic no man’s land with no way out.

We are a pillaged nation, the reality of which cannot be escaped just like when one puts their finger on a hot stove – one will be burned- and we will continue to be so

-------------------------------------

Comment to article on RedState

"And Here's Why They Do It....

Culture instills a set of shared responsibilities, traditions and duties. It has to be destroyed and uprooted in toto if the liberal ideal is ever to be instilled.

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals. - Neal Stephenson"

========================

Here is Code Pink dancing around and mocking Thomas Jefferson (referenced in above article), June 4, 2011. reuters


.

No comments: