Dean IS the Best in a Crowded Field!
Howard Dean is running for President of the United States. No really, he's got his own web site and everything. The former Governor of Vermont believes that he should be leader of the free world. Vermont has an international border…well, almost. It borders Canada, a nation that has noticeably different pronunciation of English and a sick obsession with bilingualism. Economically,
Vermont has a Gross State Product almost as large as
Microsoft's. Well, in the ballpark anyway. My friend
Michael Totten is waiting for Dean to impress him by proving that he is worthy by showing that he has a meaningful foreign policy other than "Bush is wrong; way, way, way, WRONG!" Michael is notoriously picky, and he rarely gives his support just to spite the current administration. Michael is therefore a dangerous counter-revolutionary who will be up against the wall when the real people's party comes to power.
Last week Dean wrote an Op-Ed for the
Wall Street Journal. In it he stated that the answer to our economic woes was "simple": All we needed to do was the exact opposite of the Bush Administration economic policies. I will freely acknowledge that some of the Bush Administration's economic plans are in fact a dog's breakfast. Writing in the Wall Street Journal that economic recovery is "simple", however, is intentionally rude. If it was simple, why isn't everybody doing it? It amounts to saying: "All you financial types are morons; you only need to engage in partisan politics to achieve economic prosperity!"
This is actually a fairly astute, and depressingly effective, old trick. Anybody who cares about real economics will strenuously oppose Dean, the other 80% of the population will have proof that the evil business types are conspiring against the hero of the Democratic Party. Announcing that you are a loyal student the
Robespierre School of Economics (whose central economic theory is to guillotine CEOs, CFOs, and anybody with two dimes to rub together until the economy improves) can have that effect.
Dean has already impressed me. I think he is an amazingly effective con man, easily the best in a crowded field. That is not what I want as President, though.
Getting Testy with a Marxist...
"America bores me. I once thought it was just the South, but I have traveled all over the country since then, and I have discovered that the entire country is pretty much one big yawn for me."
Have you been to Little Saigon near LA?
Have you been to a micro-brewery in Portland?
Have you been to a winery in the Yakima Valley?
Have you been to a diner in the Ozarks?
Have you been to the San Antonio Riverwalk?
Have you been to Ybor City in Tampa?
Have you been to a wooden boat builder in Maine?
Have you been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York?
Have you been to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC?
Have you toured the Capital Building in Washington, DC?
Have you been to your representatives office in Washington, DC?
Have you been to your representatives office in your state capitol?
Have you seen the sunset in Key West?
Have you toured Gettysberg?
Have you been to JR Cigars in Statesville, NC?
Have you climbed a rock in Boulder, CO?
Have you caught a salmon or halibut in Sitka, AL?
Have you been to the combat zone in Boston?
Have you been to an Off-Off Broadway play?
Have you been to a performance of your local symphony?
Have you watched a shuttle launch or landing?
Have you been to Marti Gras in New Orleans?
Have you been to St. Patrick's Day in Savannah?
Have you been to the Oriental Institute at the U of Chicago?
Have you seen a car being built in the US?
Have you seen an aircraft being built in the US?
Have you seen a ship being built in the US?
Have you been to a software development company?
Have you been to a chip fabrication plant?
I have done most of these, and I am not bored in the slightest with this country. I submit that you may have been
around, but you have not been
to the United States.
Update:
"It amuses me that of all the statements made in that long entry (of all the entries I have posted in the past few weeks), the one statement that provoked you to comment is the one statement that can be interpreted as "anti-American." In all serious curiosity, is your "patriotism button" really that hair-triggered? "
Actually, the element that bothered me the most was that statement's transparent self-loathing. Every location I listed was also a unique culture.
There is an unique and rich culture of people who visit Gettysburg.
There is an unique and rich culture of people who live in Little Saigon.
There is an unique and rich culture of people who work for congresspeople in Washington, DC.
There is an unique and rich culture of people who go to Off-Off Broadway plays.
There is an unique and rich culture of people who watch the sunset in Key West.
There is an unique and rich culture of people who build aircraft in the US.
There is an unique and rich culture of people who create software in the US.
All of these places have cultures attached to them that are valuable, vibrant, and vital.
The only way to fail to appreciate all these many cultures is to be preoccupied with ignoring the possibilities in yourself. Of course, giving me a label will probably banish self-actualization for another semester, at least.
My hair trigger is self-destructive behavior. It does tend to go off around people who mask their torture with postures of anti-americanism. Funny thing, that.
Patrick
The Meaningful Distinction
My father was arrested five times in the 1960s. Three times for helping black people register to vote in the deep south. Once for advocating migrant workers strike in California. Once for peacably assembling in a free speech area on a day that free speech had been canceled.
My father was willing to risk unjust arrest accomplishing something. My father did not seek lawful arrest while engaging in protest as an extreme sport.
Michael Totten and I had lunch last week just before I had to put together my speech for my father's memorial. Mike is great to have lunch with and talking over the differences we came up with a meaningful distinction. Looking inward with dispair for something to protest, looking outward with hope for something to accomplish.
Tie die does not make you socially concious, meaningful accomplishment does. The most dangerous young people I have ever met work in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft campus. They are smart, they are rich, they can accomplish tremendous things, and they have been treated despicably by the radical left. Oh yes, they are also generous and quite socially concious.
In Memory Of My Father
For the first two afternoons after eighth grade football practice I let myself get taunted into roughhousing with some kids. I didn't like the way they were roughhousing, they were what psychologists call "mean little turds". I went to my father and explained my problem and he told me an amazingly wise solution that changed my world. He told me that I didn't have to play with them; it didn't matter what they taunted me; my time and energy was my own. The next day I walked past those kids and to this day I have never regretted doing so. Applying that one lesson saved me an enormous amount of grief over the years.
Tom Lasswell spent his life defining himself on his own terms. He decided not to be a victim. Instead of looking inward for something to despise, he looked outward for something to accomplish. We are here in celebration of the amazing success he had in defining his character on his own terms.
After his last battle in Korea, when he was in the hospital in Japan one of the orderlies was a former Imperial Japanese Army corporal. After hearing why dad was in the hospital and the fortitude he showed, the once corporal gave dad his sword. I brought this (sword) along in celebration of my father's courage. I also wanted to take a few minutes to emphasize the ground rules and consequences for the open mike portion of the evening. My father abhorred firearms violence, but who doesn't love a samurai movie?
After the war, Dad decided to become a pacifist. This had always been a mysterious decision to me. Having argued with my father from infancy at almost every opportunity, I never viewed his nature as "pacific". Within the context of a man in active, intelligent struggle to define his own identity, this decision makes an absolute sense. Having explored the capacity of violence to accomplish worthwhile contribution to his character, and found it wanting, dad turned away from it. In much the same way as that hospital orderly had given up his sword as part of his decision to be a healer, my father decided to give up violence in order to accomplish something better.
In pacifism, my father found compelling resonances and tremendous room for growth as a decent loving man. More than that, in pacifism he found a way to break the cycle of anger in his own heart. To be a pacifist means more than not using violence as a tool to accomplish change. To be a pacifist means to commit to overcoming the causes of violence with principle and decency. Pacifism gave my father a way to help others stop being victims without causing additional victims along the way. He found another way to keep the faith. He found a way to not look inward in despair and instead look outward to accomplish.
For myself, I am here to celebrate some particular gifts from my father. I did not get a car for graduation from high school…or college either, now that I think about it. Where was I? Oh yes, I supposed to be grateful for some thing. Now I have it. I was trained not to be a victim. I was given unconditional support to study honestly and come to my own conclusions. Defending those conclusions became a…special…tradition for our family afterwards. But I learned from him how to argue earnestly and love the arguer, despite their manifold intellectual shortcomings. The last time I saw my father, we argued quite vigorously, but comfortably for us. Afterwards we watched a ball game and talked about our comfort with our intense discussions and the peculiar terror that gripped people who observed those chats.
I would also like to celebrate my father's gift of commitment to serve honorably. It is difficult to explain to strangers who never met him how important that gift is.
Finally, I want to celebrate Tom Lasswell's decision to never take his children to a riot. I mean that literally. Dad was willing to risk the police brutality of the genuinely brutal police of the 1960's himself to exercise his first amendment right to assemble peaceably. He never risked his children getting stampeded to make the six o'clock news. Even though we asked to go, the message was more important to him than the noise, and his family was more important than the message. He did not settle for a protest when he could find something to accomplish. In my final analysis, that is surely the measure of a great man.
