Culture

The American Garden: an allegory

The American Garden is the most beautiful on earth. No other garden produces more bounty and benefit for the people of the world than this one. It’s filled with plants and trees of different sizes that produce all matter of fruits and vegetables. The market stalls are filled daily with this wondrous bounty, and it has been so for a couple of hundred years. Yet if the Garden is to continue to blossom and yield its bounty, every generation of gardeners is obligated to fertilize, water, weed, and prune constantly the ever present gnarled socialist dead roots. They must dig out the old and unproductive to make room for the new. Only if this is done will the American Garden continue to flourish.

Many of the plants migrated here from European gardens. The European gardeners in centuries past expelled these plants, deciding they only wanted certain sorts of plants. Or the plants themselves decided to come to the North American Garden to find room to grow. The European gardens are much older than the American one. In Europe, every square centimeter of land has been cultivated for centuries. The gnarled socialist dead root structures suck most of the nutrients from the land. The blossoms are very small, and there is absolutely no room for anything new. Yet the plants that came here wanted to be a part of our Garden. They wanted to blossom and grow, and add to the beauty of the American Garden.

But the American Garden is now threatened. Progressive gardeners, who identify with the European gnarled socialist dead roots, believe that is the important thing in a garden. They take the market stalls filled with produce for granted. “Has it not always been so?” they ask? In their eyes, it’s more important to make the Garden “fair”. It’s unfair that there are plants that are taller and have more fruit than others, or are bigger and have more blossoms than others.

Their vision is a European Marxist-style garden with all the same size plants, few blossoms, and all utterly dependent on the gnarled socialist dead root structure they wish to establish. And they recognize if they can import enough squatty yucca plants from south of the border, they can take over the Garden and put their plan into action.

The progressive gardeners are also nostalgic about the Garden of 1945. They write books entitled “The Greatest Generation of gardeners” or do TV specials called “The Weeding”, not admitting they are forsaking their generational responsibility to keep the Garden flourishing. “We have the most beautiful garden in the world” they say. “Therefore, it can tolerate a few weeds, and we don’t need to prune, fertilize or water as much”. Rather than dirty their hands pruning or fertilizing, they attend cocktail parties criticizing the Garden’s ‘inequities’ or fantasizing about the virtues of the Marxist Garden, ignoring the Eastern European garden’s utter failure, including the death toll of a hundred million plants.

In a Marxist garden, the Marxist gardeners give the plants blossom quotas, and threaten to uproot them if they fail. Yet all the water and fertilization is consumed by the gnarled socialist roots. Marxist gardeners believe that all the plants should have the “social consciousness” to blossom properly. In their view, it is “social deviationism” that causes them to fail. Thus, more blossoms can be achieved by threats and uprootings as an example to others.

Another threat to the Garden is the Islamic thistle that is blowing in from the distant deserts. There is some talk about the necessity of weeding out these thistles to preserve the Garden. But the Progressive tolerant gardeners argue “was not our garden established with transplants originally?” That’s true, but the Islamic thistles are not like the other transplants.

Islamic Thistles derive from parched, poverty-stricken, barren lands that have remained unchanged for thousands of years. They can’t comprehend fertile lands and flowing rivers except as an afterlife paradise. Yet their long-dead gardener has given them the mission to spread their barren, medieval, weed-strewn poverty around the world. They have no intention of blossoming and adding to the American Garden. It is their stated intention to replace every plant in our Garden with their noxious weed and choke out and kill everything else. That is reason enough to cull these thistles from our garden. And there is some weeding taking place in distant lands. Even so, the progressive gardeners object.

Progressive gardener George Soros argues that pulling the thistles is what’s causing them to grow. Other Progressive gardeners lament that the thistles seem to return no matter how fast they are pulled. They wish to give up and withdraw the weeders. The Ecclesiastical gardeners hold that weeding of any kind is immoral, because it destroys life. They choose to ignore the death and destruction over the centuries and up to the present day caused by the Islamic thistles. They have forgotten the thousand-year struggle of their church forefathers to keep the Islamic Thistles from overwhelming all of Christendom! “We just need to reach out, understand, and dialogue with the Islamic thistle” they say.

FBI and Homeland Security gardeners are told by their lawyers that they are forbidden to pull up the Islamic thistles until they actually go to Jihad-seed and do real damage. This in spite of their own studies that show the earlier the Thistles are uprooted, the fewer Jihad-seeds there will be.

Thus is the state of the Garden today. The Marxist Progressive gardeners strive to bring in 40 million yucca plants. They fuel their chain saws while they eye the fruit trees and produce-laden plants. Islamic thistles sprout in every corner of the garden, but are ignored. The Marxist Progressive gardeners prefer to concentrate on “Justice and Equality for the American Garden” and assume the bounty will continue indefinitely.

A closer look at the Jena affair

When a gang of “chip on their shoulders” black youth terrorize and beat white kids, it’s called an “expression of ethnic identity”. But if the white kids band together for protection, it’s called “racist white supremacy.” As shown by this Snopes.com fact check of the Jena affair, the assumed direct linkage of the noose incident and the beatings omits significant intervening events.

The biggest racists in this whole mess are Jesse Jackson and Rev Al Sharpton. The foundational outrage in all of this is the Progressive theological notion that “only the dominant group can be racist”, which is utter nonsense. Either we strive for Martin Luther King’s color blind society or we do not.

The reverse discrimination to “undo the years of discrimination” is fraudulent. And there is no mechanism to turn it off, no way to measure when enough is enough. It is conferring perks and privilege on the basis of skin color, which has fragmented our nation into warring racial and ethnic groups. Diversity is not our strength! It is a source of weakening, division, and conflict. But then, weakening America has always been the Progressive agenda.

Our forefathers realized that in order to build unity they had to leave religious denomination off the table. So must we now concerning race and ethnicity. We enjoy our rights and liberties on an individual basis, not on the basis of our race. We need to eliminate the 3 pages of racial group check boxes we find now on every government application.

The racist agitators such as Jackson and Sharpton need to be shamed, ostracized, put out of business, and recognized as the hypocrites they are.

Aldous Huxley at Auraria?

Last week I was on the Auraria campus of CU-Denver a couple of times for notable events. On Sept. 11, President Hank Brown launched a new lecture series under his personal sponsorship, hosting John Agresto for a discussion of lessons about the American character in light of our Iraq experience and the struggle against terrorism. Then on Sept. 15, a statewide teen conference in honor of Constitution Day was presented on campus by LibertyDay.org, the national civics project headed by Andy McKean of Littleton.

Several impressions stayed with me. One, education for citizenship isn't quite as dead at our high schools and colleges as curmudgeons like me sometimes claim, though it still needs a lot of reviving.

Two, the Auraria campus buildings and grounds look great -- well-appointed, attentively maintained, and with visible signs of expansion. No evidence of the alleged financial crisis of Colorado higher education meets the eye.

Three, it always saddens me to see Auraria's grand old churches (including our state's first synagogue) now serving mostly as museums, historic sites, or secular meeting facilities rather than houses of worship. You couldn't have a more vivid symbol of our current practice of drawing down the West's moral and spiritual heritage, rather than sustaining it as integral to the process of cultural transmission and learning.

Fourth -- and in my opinion the most revealing detail of all, though seemingly small -- what volumes were spoken about our times by a men's-room vending machine in one of the classroom buildings.

The items for sale were condoms, Excedrin, Tylenol, and Tic-Tacs: little packages, none more than a dollar, fully equipping your modern college guy for the day's eventualities of pleasure, pain, and politeness as he acquires higher learning.

Will it occur to him, if Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" happens be assigned in one of his English classes, that the state-sponsored, responsibility-sapping availability of Soma bliss and recreational sex envisioned by Huxley is not far from being realized in the here and now?

And even if it does, will he recognize the danger this poses to himself, his generation, and our country? I hope so, but I doubt it.

[Cross-posted at PoliticsWest.com]

Ministry from on high

That was the Los Angeles Times front-page headline on Aug. 16 about prayer flights over Denver in a helicopter, sparked by two guys from my church, pilot Jeff Puckett and pastor Tom Melton. Similar story in Denver Post on Aug. 31. TV interest bubbling with ABC, CBS, and Fox. Puckett, who has now carried aloft over 1100 individuals on the weekly flights, calls his chopper "Prayer One." Pretty neat.

Ignorant educators at it again

How about that Dwight Jones? The newly appointed Colorado Education Commissioner, in one of his last official acts as superintendent of Fountain-Fort Carson school district, made sure the students in his 2007 graduating class were protected from such dangerous propaganda as a pocket booklet containing the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Whew, that was close; well done, Dr. Jones. Erin Emery reports in the Denver Post that Jones's District 8 was one of two in the Colorado Springs area that rebuffed the gift offer from El Paso County commissioner Douglas Bruce last spring. Officials in Lewis-Palmer District 38 also stood vigilant against the suspicious stranger offering political candy to kids. At least 12 other districts accepted the booklets for distribution to graduates.

A District 38 spokeswoman explained that the school board, administrators, and principal decided "if they let him hand out something that he thought was innocuous then, of course, we couldn't say no to anyone else." Indeed, what might be next: Hare Krishna tracts, oil industry climate propaganda, perhaps even condoms? Us guardians of young minds had best draw a firm line and keep'em all out.

Now consider: if high-ranking educators made a language blooper like using "us" as the subject of a sentence, everyone might -- might -- notice and protest. But these ignoramuses in D-8 and D-38 have committed a far worse civic and philosophic outrage, and you can bet this story will have no legs at all. A controversial citizen, Bruce, gets the brushoff from a well-credentialed PhD, Jones -- so what? The world yawns.

Do I exaggerate? It truly is a civic outrage when D-38's Robin Adair can damn America's charter of self-government with faint praise as "a lovely document [that] we have[n't] anything against." And it's a philosophic outrage when she can describe the Constitution, on behalf of the people's elected board of education, as "something that he [Bruce] thought was innocuous."

Notice the intellectually fashionable, scrupulously neutral relativism in those words. The school board isn't saying the booklet with our founding documents is noxious, but they're not saying it's innocuous either. The latter is just some guy's opinion -- handled sniffily with rubber gloves and tongs by the antiseptic agents of officialdom. Post-modernists everywhere applaud, while in Beijing and Havana ironic smiles break out: they know quite well how noxious Doug Bruce's little gift really is.

What we're really glimpsing here -- at least in the Lewis-Palmer case, since at Fountain-Fort Carson no reason was given -- is the toxic multiculturalism that now pervades American education at all levels. Prof. Thomas Krannawitter of Hillsdale College defined it well in the Investor's Business Daily the other day:

"Multiculturalism... agrees on balance that there is no objective truth, especially no moral or political truth, to be discovered by human reason.... The real test of multicultural education is whether one has freed one's mind from the trappings of one's own culture -- especially... American culture..." Bingo. Ms. Adair probably had no idea that's what she was voicing. But she was. Shame on her, her employers, and Commissioner Dwight Jones. What over-educated fools they all are.

To end on an up note, though, Coloradans can be grateful and proud that we have in our backyard the Littleton-based Liberty Day organization, a national volunteer powerhouse dedicated to giving students across the country -- you guessed it -- pocket copies of the Constitution and Declaration.

Andy McKean, the founder, is working with high-schooler Jimmy Sengenberger to host a statewide conference for students on Saturday, September 15, at CU-Denver, where a spectrum of speakers (me included) will talk about what the Constitution means and why it's so noxious to tyrants of every size, grand and petty alike. Do you know a teen who ought to attend? Here's the link for more information.