Che and Churchill: There's a Little Eichmann in All of Us

How does a Ward Churchill happen?

I was fascinated by indians and the west when I was a young boy living in Illinois. I roamed my uncle's timber in the Dean Hills with my .22, and canoed down The Kaskaskia River, camping under the stars, fishing, and gigging frogs as I went.

But I really wanted to do all that out west, in the Rocky Mountains. Maybe similar childhood fantasies are what drove fellow Illinoisan Ward Churchill to go off the deep end with the whole hippie-radical-Indian thing.

It's easy to call him a charlatan, because the facts bear this out.  But that is too simple. Perhaps his his goals were noble. There used to be few blacks out west, so Native Americans had to stand in as the despised minority once the Chinese went mainstream. So a good western hippie took up the cause of the red man.

I didn't get to see Boulder until the 1980's, but I'm sure Ward fit that scene well back in the 60's, with his fiery intellectualism and Indian braids. I can see how he could get so into it that he ended up deluding himself and authentically become the fantasy he had created.

What I don't understand is how the CU Board of Regents fell for it
 
You can call yourself an Indian and declare the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," but you'd better have your academic credentials in order.

I hold nothing against hippies. I wanted to be one when I was a kid. But then I grew up. Even then, I could not resist hitching to Boulder when The Dead came to town. I would spend the whole weekend joining throngs of deadheads playing guitars and banging tambourines on Pearl Street. I always found some hippies willing to take me in. They didn't even mind me refusing the dope.

Later on, I made many friends in Latin America who were self-avowed socialist and leftists who idolized Castro and El Che, and who still spoke bitterly about what Pinochet did to Allende. Like my hippie friends, all sincere people.

Bring it all down, man!

But there are many on the left preaching peace and brotherhood who would do great violence to achieve this dream. Che Guevara killed poor campesinos. Is it any wonder the good folks of Higuera dropped a dime on his murdering ass? Leftist hagiography also avoids the documented evidence that Salvador Allende was becoming increaslingly infatuated with violence and accumulating arms before his downfall.

There are people on the right itching to set it all "right" with violence as well. I'm not saying anybody's better than anyone else. It's just that so much of this on the left gets overlooked or romanticized while the right is inevitably tied to Hitler.

Hitler was not a "Right-Winger" anyway. He embodied a Nietzchean overthrow of traditional religion-based morality while indulging himself and his adopted countrymen in in a grotesque twist of Rousseau's back-to-nature romanticism, with Wagner blaring in the background. Hardly conservative.

We are flawed human beings, searching for the truth. When we think we've found it, we have a strong desire to impose it on others.

There's a little Eichmann in all of us, including Ward Churchill.

Arizona, Cut Off Your Indian Braids

Peace and Freedom through Anarchy

What is freedom? What is libertarianism? Can anarchy bring peace?

I find libertarianism attractive in the abstract, but sometimes jarring in the cold glare of reality. It doesn't help that I recently read that it grew out of anarchism, but it does make sense that the logical end of libertarianism is anarchy.

Libertarianism makes striking sense in that simplistic "if everybody minded their own business we'd all get along" kind of way. But what really impresses me about this ideology is its logical coherence.

Stephen Kinsella has written an interesting piece reducing all individual rights down to property rights and then showing how this is the key to peace and happiness.

As Murray Rothbard explained, individual rights are property rights.[2] And justice is just giving someone his due, which depends on what his rights are.[3]

The nonaggression principle is also dependent on property rights, since what aggression is depends on what our (property) rights are. If you hit me, it is aggression because I have a property right in my body. If I take from you the apple you possess, this is trespass — aggression — only because you own the apple. One cannot identify an act of aggression without implicitly assigning a corresponding property right to the victim.

I find this idea intriguing because it bolsters the case against an overweening government as well as against invasions and wars of aggression. I am against both, but I have participated in the latter. I love things that rip your mind in two different directions.

If a state pays for you and decides for you, it owns you, and your rights disappear because you become de facto property of the state. That applies to citizens as well as invaded countries. And the motivation of the aggressor state does not matter. It could have the best of intentions, but you are still violated.

Anyway, I recommend Mr. Kinsella's article. It's good food for thought.

Mises - Stephan Kinsella

Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
-- by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Easy enough said when someone has been stricken, so strong only a day ago, and now laboriously breathing upon perhaps her deathbed.

A woman I have loved my whole life lays dying, and I do not want her to rage against the dying of the light.  I pray she go gently.  She is old, and at last frail, after a beautiful, robust life that began in the great depression.  Her health has been failing for years, eyesight, agility, but I've known enough old people to know that losing one's independence is the coup de grace.  That is when even the most potent zest for life begins to wane.

She had that grandma's way of making you feel special.  I was a little shrimp, but she would compliment me on what a big guy I was.  She'd send me to fetch her big tupperware container of flour to the kitchen table for her and compliment me on how strong I was and ask me to show her my muscles.  When I started driving, I'd get a call from granny every now and then asking me to come over so she could scold me about my reckless driving, and then ironically insist I sit down with her and Grandpa and watch The Dukes of Hazard, with all that reckless driving going on...

*

I wrote this over a year ago when my granny was slowly fading away, but I couldn't finish it.  Now, my wife's mother is on her deathbed, and, save for a few particulars, my words apply to her as well.  She is ready.  She has told her children many times over these past few months.

Go gentle, dear mother.  I love you as though you were my own.

Abnormal Psychology

"If 7-year-old Mozart tried composing his concertos today, he might be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated into barren normality."
-- George Will

They pegged my son as ADHD a few years back.  The psychologists ignored the fact that I was deployed to the Middle East for a year and that he may have been worried about his dad getting killed in a war he saw every day on the news.  They also failed to realize he was bored.

We addressed it all when I got back.  I was angered at the eagerness of these "professionals" to push drugs on a 9 year old.  The only good that came of it was a comprehensive "IQ" test we paid for ourselves because it was not covered by insurance.  Yes, he scored a little low on short term memory retention (imagine that, a 9 year old not paying attention!).  We also found out that although he was no genius, he was advanced for the classes he was taking.

ADHD is Real, But Drugs are not the Answer

We turned down the offer from the drug pushers (my son being the most adamant) and followed the advice of anti-drug heroes Dr David Stein and Thom Hartmann.  These two men are essential reading for parents who have been told their kids have ADHD.  Hartmann's The Edison Gene will help you understand the ADHD child so you can develop strategies for success.  Dr. Stein dispenses practical advice on how to parent an ADHD child, from schoolwork to behavioral issues. 

We bought him an electronics kit, a programmable Mindstorm robot, gave him a violin and let him join orchestra, and we had him tested into advanced classes.  Add in karate, and a crisis was now a manageable minor issue.  He was now a normal, rambunctious inquisitive, annoying 9-year-old boy, who is prone to forgetfulness.

George Will turns his incisive analysis on psychology in America:

The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry's encyclopedia of supposed mental "disorders," is being revised

Today's DSM defines "oppositional defiant disorder" as a pattern of "negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures." Symptoms include "often loses temper," "often deliberately annoys people" or "is often touchy."

DSM omits this symptom: "is a teenager."

Disordered Nation

This DSM defines as "personality disorders" attributes that once were considered character flaws.

"Antisocial personality disorder" is "a pervasive pattern of disregard for ... the rights of others ... callous, cynical ... an inflated and arrogant self-appraisal." "Histrionic personality disorder" is "excessive emotionality and attention-seeking." "Narcissistic personality disorder" involves "grandiosity, need for admiration ... boastful and pretentious." And so on.

You mean sex addiction isn't normal?

The revised DSM reportedly may include "binge eating disorder" and "hypersexual disorder" ("a great deal of time" devoted to "sexual fantasies and urges" and "planning for and engaging in sexual behavior"). Concerning children, there might be "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria."

Why should we care?

If every character blemish or emotional turbulence is a "disorder" akin to a physical disability, legal accommodations are mandatory.

Under federal law, "disabilities" include any "mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities"; "mental impairments" include "emotional or mental illness." So there might be a legal entitlement to be a jerk. (See above, "antisocial personality disorder.")

Bottom Line:   We all Pay

All of this must be covered by insurance, causing all of us to pay higher premiums so psychologists can rake in more money, based upon a book they wrote.  Talk about a self-licking ice cream cone.  Anyone who suffers any of these "disorders" must be given special dispensations at school and at work, creating perverse incentives to be "disordered."

We are paying for our own downfall.  That's disordered.

*-There really are some disorders that require medication.  I am criticizing abuses of the system, not the treatment of legitimate problems. --Curt

RCP - George Will
Thom Hartmann

Anything more than Nasty, Brutish and Short is Icing on the Cake

Blogger Ben Sutherland recently wrote about life being FUBAR. He is so right that life is broken, and to an idealist that realization can be very depressing. I have a real problem with people who believe in the perfectibility of man. Spending a little time in Ben's world of special education on the wrong side of the tracks would quickly disabuse the naive of this notion.

The world is broken and nobody can fix it. All each person can do is to try to illuminate the little corner they are in. Look at the world: Pinprick sparkles of civilization scattered across a sea of Hobbesean brutality. To not be upset about it is to surrender your humanity. Obsessing over it can cause you to lose your sanity. The trick is to not let it drive you crazy or deter you from keeping your own little corner bright and clean.

Ever read "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Hemingway?

Michael Vick's Dogged Determinism

Should Michael Vick be allowed to play football again?

I think so. A man's livelihood is an important part of who he is. What else can Vick do to support himself and his family? Star in a real-life remake of The Longest Yard? He is a gifted athlete. Hanging drywall, while beneficial to society and those professionals who do it, would be grossly unfulfilling for this formerly high-flying falcon. A man of his talents must be free to exercise them.

Allowing him to be an NFL quarterback again would not be condoning his actions. Rather, it would be an acknowledgment that he has paid his debt to society and to the animal kingdom. If a society punishes someone, it should also hold out redemption.

Is he repentant? Who knows. If we take him at his word, he has learned some valuable life lessons. The average ex-con doesn't have the skills or talents to put his life back together; Michael Vick does.

Would I trust him to stay in my house and watch my dog? I don't know... I do know that giving him a chance to prove himself on the gridiron again costs me nothing; that's why I advocate giving him another shot at NFL superstardom. We as a society bear no risk; it's all on Michael Vick and the NFL, so why not?

The NFL is a gansta joint anyway, so bringing Vick back can only increase the multi-billion dollar revenue stream that flows inexorably from the unemployed and working class to the millionaire owners and players. A dog's gotta bark, a quarterback's gotta throw a football, and the fans gotta cheer.

Who are we to stand in the way of destiny?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism