Flash: Santa is a conservative

The worst Christmas song I've heard this year has to be Bruce Springsteen's tuneless rendition of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." Yet by forcing me to think about the lyrics, the Boss delivered a flash of insight: conservatives do the jolly old elf a grave wrong in calling him the patron saint of something-for-nothing Democrats. We should claim Santa as our own. Listing who's been bad and good, naughty and nice? Warning us not to cry (play the victim) or pout (cast blame and act entitled)? There's little difference, when you think about it, between St. Nick and St. Newt. George Will himself could hardly be more stern and judgmental. Santa Claus rightly understood is a far cry from the unearned redistribution of John Edwards or the syrupy hope of Obama.

Even if recast from the unnerving red-clad (red, Republican, get it?) bearded geezer of yore to the more kid-friendly persona of Mr. Rogers, as David Grimes recommended in Sunday's Denver Post, Father Christmas remains a no-nonsense apostle of good conduct, rigorous standards, and time-honored traditions. The "Santa's Coming" song, even when butchered by Springsteen, is just the opposite of that favorite left-liberal anthem, "Anything Goes."

Jeffrey Bell, writing in the Weekly Standard, offers a great Christmas gift for all of us on the right with this masterful summary of what the left really wants -- a total repudiation of St. Nicolas and his strictness, a hot revolution that would melt the North Pole faster than you can say Al Gore:

"The goal of the left is the liberation of mankind from traditional institutions and codes of behavior, especially moral codes. It seeks a restoration (or achievement) of a state of nature, one of absolute individual liberty--universal happiness without the need for laws. The proposed political way stations chosen by the left in its drive toward this vision have [included]: abolition of private property (socialism); prohibition of Christianity and/or propagation by the political elite of a new civil religion to replace it; confiscatory taxation, especially at death; regulation of political speech to limit the ability of certain individuals or classes to affect politics; the takeover of education to instill new values and moral habits in the population; confiscation of privately held firearms; gradual phasing out of the nation-state; displacement of the traditional family in favor of child-rearing by an enlightened governmental elite; and the inversion of sexual morality to elevate recreational sex and reduce the prestige of procreative sex."

Some agenda, huh? It adds up to the exact opposite of "be good for goodness' sake." And notice, by the way, that this injunction from Santa Claus, courtesy of songwriter Haven Gillespie, doesn't merely appeal to utilitarian self-interest. Rather it invokes a moral absolute which, when obeyed, is its own reward. A pitch-perfect echo of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and "Theory of Moral Sentiments," in what you thought was just an empty Yuletide ditty. Mirabile dictu!

Lest we forget, however, the true reason for this season is neither St. Nick on the right nor Holiday Hillary on the left, but the baby born in Bethlehem. The Prince of Peace transcends liberal and conservative. He is a miracle even more mysterious than a large man ascending a small chimney. None of us is good enough to deserve His unspeakable gift, salvation and life eternal, yet none of us is so bad as to be disqualified from it. Here indeed is a present worth unwrapping. A merry and, yes, a holy Christmas to all.

"Me, the gunman, and God"

Security guard? That's not quite accurate. Jeanne Assam, the former police officer whose fearless shooting halted the massacre at New Life Church on Sunday, was first of all a church member, a Christ-follower. She was one of those voluntarily standing watch during the late service after having worshiped at an earlier service. She brought her gun to New Life that day in readiness to risk her life for the protection of others' lives, and for the defense of fellow believers' right to practice their faith unmolested. Good thing she did. Matthew Murray, the deranged killer, wanted Christians dead and set his own life at no value toward that end. Jeanne Assam wanted Christians protected and alive and safe -- and set her own life at no value toward that end. She advanced on him like David against Goliath, and with the same result. How instructive it is to read their contrasting accounts in today's Denver Post (see the foregoing links).

And how utterly backward, in light of all this, is Tuesday's letter to the Post by Robert Tiernan of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Though he condemns Mitt Romney for having "pandered to deists" and "ignored the rights of atheists," that's not what the Massachusetts Republican did in last week's speech. Rather, Romney explained precisely why an America where faith flourishes is a far better country -- a place where the self-giving typified by Assam can overcome the self-destructiveness tragically manifested in Murray.

Violence and bloodshed and lives on the line in places of faith, such as our state experienced this weekend in Arvada and Colorado Springs, are not as incongruous as they may seem. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah, concluding today, commemorates a desperate fight for survival 2100 years ago by believers in the biblical God. The Christmas story, retold in churches this month, includes soldiers slaughtering infants as one family flees for its life.

The newborn son of that family, Jesus of Nazareth, would grow up to tell his followers, "A time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God" (John 16:2). His own execution was carried out soon thereafter, with that very motivation.

So the deadly hatred voiced by Matthew Murray is nothing new after all. "You Christians brought this on yourselves," he wrote on a website in the midst of Sunday's killing spree. "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can, especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems of the world."

Peter and his fellow apostles would not be surprised at this syllogism of evil, in the first century or the 21st. Robert Tiernan would no doubt disavow the murderer's conclusion; but would he completely reject the premise? As for Jeanne Assam, Christ-follower and armed churchgoer -- she, thank God, left home on the morning of December 9 fully aware of the risks that faith involves, and fully prepared to face them.

Where are the great?

(Denver Post, Dec. 2) Midgets everywhere. Rappers, starlets, shrinks, scolds, facilitators, litigators, hustlers, hucksters, victims, vegans. Ours is the age of the shallow, the small, the squalid. Where are the great? “There were giants in the earth in those days,” says Genesis. Granted, every era magnifies the memory of bygone times. But what now passes for excellence in manhood and womanhood, thought and expression, moral and civic life, would make our grandparents shake their heads. For a third of a century we’ve lived in a house I call Marcus Bend, after my mother’s father, who helped buy it. I’m here surrounded with books and mementoes as the old year wanes, sobered by Christmas clamor, candidate noise and war news, wondering and worrying: Where are the great?

Stacked on the desk are “From Dawn to Decadence” by Jacques Barzun, “America: The Last Best Hope” by William Bennett, “The Abolition of Man” by C.S. Lewis, Winston Churchill’s memoir “My Early Life,” an FDR biography by Conrad Black, books on Chesterton and John Paul II, “The Western Canon” by Harold Bloom, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Ivan Denisovich” and his Harvard address. Collectively they look upon 2007 and frown.

The scholarly Barzun, who turned 100 last week, is a great man of our time and a worthy judge of greatness. His book, a history of civilization from 1500 to the present, warns of today’s “urge to build a wall against the past…a revulsion from things in the present that seem a curse from our forebears.”

He writes of the 20th century as a time when elements that “made the nation-state the carrier of civilization… a common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service… were decaying and could not be restored.” He hopes for a 22nd century when boredom may stir new “radicals” to study afresh the old texts, “the record of a fuller life,” from which the West then rediscovers “what a joy it is to be alive.” Of the present century Jacques Barzun is less hopeful.

By what sickness of the soul could America and other nations blessed with the heritage of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia come to see all of this as “a curse from our forebears?” Solzhenitsyn, another contemporary great, gives the diagnosis:

“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer…. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty.” It is not true, insists the Russian giant, that “man is above everything.” Nor is it right that “man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all.”

Courage, faith, integrity, and honor, ordinary virtues harnessed to extraordinary gifts, constitute human greatness or the potential for it. Guy McBride, retired president of the Colorado School of Mines, and Vernon Grounds, retired president of Denver Seminary, have that heroic stature with me. Some of those books I’ve found so inspiring, by or about the great, reached me through them.

Great souls ennoble our world in big and little ways. Think of the late Bill Hosokawa of the Denver Post, or former Sen. Bill Armstrong. Is there a touch of that in Peter Groff, recently chosen as Colorado Senate President? We’ll see.

Over the centuries, nations flourish and fade in a cycle, the Scots philosopher Alexander Tytler is supposed to have said. Out of bondage come faith and courage, then liberty and abundance. But when these breed complacency and apathy, dependence ensues and bondage returns. If this sounds like an American self-portrait, we need to value greatness more.

Thanksgiving 2007, such as it is

Two turkeys named May and Flower will not be carved up tomorrow after all. They were spared by a mock presidential pardon earlier this week. Do you care? Me neither, but I learned about it on the White House home page, in the course of looking for President Bush's official Thanksgiving Day proclamation. The pardon story is right there up front, whereas you have to drill down a layer or two to find the proclamation. This is what we've come to, 218 years after the First US Congress resolved to ask President George Washington for an official proclamation of national thanksgiving. He obliged with this masterpiece, which along with Lincoln's wartime proclamation of 1863 is probably the best known in the long line of annual documents.

I enjoy reading each year's proclamation, no matter who is in the White House. I grew up hearing them read in church services on the Thursday morning, prior to our family dinner around my mother's or grandmother's table. The menu was always turkey, but back then that wasn't the name of the day. The day was about giving gratitude to God for his favor upon our nation, and honoring Him in hope of its continuation.

In the 1950s in those towns where I lived in Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado, Americans still believed that "it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor," as Washington's 1789 proclamation puts it.

Many agreed with the Father of our Country, even then, that the prayers on Thanksgiving Day should go so far as to "beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions" as well as "to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue" in America.

Lincoln's 1863 proclamation is also worth reading in full and pondering. In the third year of a horrific civil war, the Emancipator was able to enumerate many blessings for which gratitude to God was due, summarizing: "No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy."

Like Washington, he too urged that the day include "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience," and his recommended approach to praying for peace did not omit a submissive note, foreshadowing the Second Inaugural address 16 months later. Citizens, he urged, should "fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union" (italics added).

It's a long way from the sunlit America of 1789 to the agonized land of 1863 to the turkey pardon of 2007. I very seldom agree with Marx about anything, but you wonder if this is one of those cases he noted of history repeating itself -- first as tragedy and then as farce.

While President Bush's proclamation for this year contains little that God-fearing Americans may disagree with, there is almost nothing in it that challenges us to remember a Deity whom the first president called "that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be" and whom the 16th president referred to as "the Source... our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."

Bush mentions God only a single time in his own words about the present day, and only twice more in historical references to what earlier generations believed. This from a president who is undoubtedly a man of deep faith, directed to a country that has been called the world's most devout, "a nation with the soul of a church." It's a matter, I guess, of what any public official is now permitted (by the secularist watchdogs of mass media and cultural elites) to say upon any public occasion, even Thanksgiving Day. One is moved to cry out, not flippantly but in all earnest: God help us!

Wild swirls, no; wild girls, no problem

On Fox News the other night, Oct. 19, there was a discussion between Greta Van Susteren and Laura Ingraham about "Girls Gone Wild,"the national TV show that features such debauchery as inebriated 18-year-old girls flashing the camera with their bare breasts. Ms. Ingraham expressed the view that such displays are a demeaning exploitation of women (true). Yet Ms. Van Susteren held that such activities could not and should not be stopped owing to 1st Amendment constitutional liberties (which is also true). The question to ask is this: why is not Joe Francis doing a "Saudi Arabian Girls Gone Wild" version of his show? Probably because he knows it would be suicidal. That again is true -- and it's a direct, if extreme, extension of Laura Ingraham's point.

Greta Van Susteren, the apparent secularist, has subconsciously embraced the progressive view that does two things in cases like this.

One, it substitutes legalism for morality. This is the principal reason the ACLU is working diligently to sever the Judeo-Christian roots of our society. It seeks to enhance the idea that activist judges are the ones to determine good and evil. This would pave the way to euthanasia of the aged and handicapped, as well as wholesale abortion; an overall devaluation of life such as we see in Holland today. Though the ACLU paints itself as a "defender of liberty," what they really wish to do is install a progressive, elitist governance of our society by those (themselves) who "know better what's good for us".

Secondly, progressivism assumes there could only be a governmental solution to such an issue and reaches for it.

Laura Ingraham, by contrast, advocates public outrage to shut such programs down. The purveyors of the various degrees of X ratings would never show restraint unless pressured to do so, or when faced with broad moral disapproval such as there still is (we'll see for how long) against pedophilia and bestiality.

The liberal media is manifestly terrified of religious and moral condemnation when its originates from the Islamics. Muslim fury at the slightest perceived insult has even the most ardent liberals running for cover. A recent example was Islamic objection to an ad for ice cream cones because the swirls on top looked something like the Arabic for "Allah." Certainly, then, a "Saudi Arabian Girls Gone Wild" is out of the question.

And if our Western Civilization is to survive, at some point the "Girls Gone Wild" should be out of the question here as well. The corollaries of illegimate births, smashed lives and the poverty of single mom households are not a good thing.