The Phobia(s) That Are Destroying America

Many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people show a disturbing level of fear, contempt, and anger directed toward Christians, non-college graduates, and rural people (especially southerners).   This complex of negative emotions often greatly exceeds anything that these same people feel toward radical Islamists or dangerous rogue-state governments. I’m not a Christian myself,  but I’d think that you would be a lot more worried about people who want to cut your head off, blow you up, or at a bare minimum shut down your freedom of speech than about people who want to talk to you about Jesus (or Nascar!)

It seems that there are quite a few people who vote Democratic, even when their domestic and foreign-policy views are not closely aligned with those of the Democratic Party, because they view the Republican Party and its candidates as being dominated by Christians and “rednecks.”  The hostility toward Trump is substantially motivated by hostility toward those who are his supporters (or those who are assumed to be his supporters)

What is the origin of this anti-Christian, anti-noncollege, anti-“redneck” feeling? Some have suggested that it’s a matter of oikophobia … the aversion to the familiar, or “the repudiation of inheritance and home,” as philosopher Roger Scruton uses the term. I think this is doubtless true in some cases: the kid who grew up in a rural Christian home and wants to make a clean break with his family heritage, or the individual who grew up in an oppressively conformist Bible Belt community. But I think such cases represent a relatively small part of the category of people I’m talking about here. A fervently anti-Christian, anti-Southern individual who grew up in New York or Boston or San Francisco is unlikely to be motivated by oikophobia. Indeed, far from being excessively familiar, Christians and Southern people are likely as exotic to him as the most remote tribes of New Guinea.

Equally exotic, but much safer to sneer at. And here, I think, we have the explanation for much, though not all, of the anti-Christian, anti-Southern bigotry. It is a safe outlet for the unfortunately-common human tendency to look down on members of an out group. Safer socially than bigotry against Black people or gays or those New Guinea tribesmen; much less likely to earn you the disapproval of authority figures in school or work or of your neighbors. Safer physically than saying anything negative about Muslims, as you’re much less likely to face violent retaliation.

There are some other factors which I think motivate some people toward the anti-Christian anti-Southern mindset. One is the fear that Christians, especially Southern Christians, are anti-science, and that Republican electoral victories will reduce Federal support for science or even lead to restrictions on scientific research. And indeed, some conservatives/Republicans have been known to make some pretty strange statements, such as former Rep. Paul Broun’s assertion, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”

But in realistic terms, there is far more threat to US science from “animal rights” terrorists – the vast majority of whom are politically on the Left – than from anti-evolutionists. And there is even more threat from  pressures on allowable and non-allowable topics for university research…pressures which emanate almost exclusively from the “woke” Left. And numerous followers of “progressivism” are believers in various forms of mysticism, such as magical crystals and a conscious Gaia, which are at least as inconsistent with pure scientific materialism as are the Biblical miracles. At the level of practical technology, the irrational hostility toward nuclear power, genetically-modified crops, etc., comes almost entirely from the Left.

Another factor is sex. Many seem to fear that conservatives/Republicans are anti-sex “Puritans” and will force women into metaphorical (or maybe not so metaphorical!) chastity belts. Democratic Party operatives have done their best to conflate opposition to forcing institutions to pay for birth control with opposition to birth control itself. In reality, no serious Republican national-level politician is remotely proposing the banning of birth control or, for that matter, the banning of homosexuality. And, speaking of “Puritanism,” we should note that the anti-male hostility emanating from certain radical feminists, who are almost entirely creatures of the Left, has done much to poison the relationship between the sexes, especially on college campuses.

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Shall It Be Sustained?

As a July 4th tradition, I’ve posted an excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem Listen to the People.  The title I originally used for these posts was It Shall Be Sustained, which is from the last line of Benet’s poem.

Narrator:

This is Independence Day,
Fourth of July, the day we mean to keep,
Whatever happens and whatever falls
Out of a sky grown strange;
This is firecracker day for sunburnt kids,
The day of the parade,
Slambanging down the street.
Listen to the parade!
There’s J. K. Burney’s float,
Red-white-and-blue crepe-paper on the wheels,
The Fire Department and the local Grange,
There are the pretty girls with their hair curled
Who represent the Thirteen Colonies,
The Spirit of East Greenwich, Betsy Ross,
Democracy, or just some pretty girls.
There are the veterans and the Legion Post
(Their feet are going to hurt when they get home),
The band, the flag, the band, the usual crowd,
Good-humored, watching, hot,
Silent a second as the flag goes by,
Kidding the local cop and eating popsicles,
Jack Brown and Rosie Shapiro and Dan Shay,
Paul Bunchick and the Greek who runs the Greek’s,
The black-eyed children out of Sicily,
The girls who giggle and the boys who push,
All of them there and all of them a nation.
And, afterwards,
There’ll be ice-cream and fireworks and a speech
By somebody the Honorable Who,
The lovers will pair off in the kind dark
And Tessie Jones, our honor-graduate,
Will read the declaration.
That’s how it is. It’s always been that way.
That’s our Fourth of July, through war and peace,
That’s our fourth of July.

And a lean farmer on a stony farm
Came home from mowing, buttoned up his shirt
And walked ten miles to town.
Musket in hand.
He didn’t know the sky was falling down
And, it may be, he didn’t know so much.
But people oughtn’t to be pushed around
By kings or any such.
A workman in the city dropped his tools.
An ordinary, small-town kind of man
Found himself standing in the April sun,
One of a ragged line
Against the skilled professionals of war,
The matchless infantry who could not fail,
Not for the profit, not to conquer worlds,
Not for the pomp or the heroic tale
But first, and principally, since he was sore.
They could do things in quite a lot of places.
They shouldn’t do them here, in Lexington.

He looked around and saw his neighbors’ faces…

The poem is very long, and is worth reading in full. The full text was published in Life Magazine; it is online here.

Benet’s poem ends with these words:

We made it and we make it and it’s ours
We shall maintain it. It shall be sustained

But shall it?

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D-Day plus 80 Years

Neptunus Lex:  The liberation of France started when each, individual man on those landing craft as the ramp came down each paratroop in his transport when the light turned green made the individual decision to step off with the only life he had and face the fire.]

American Digest:  A walk across a beach in Normandy

Don Sensing points out that success was by no means assured:  The pivot day of history

Stephen Green about the complexity of the planning that made success possible.

A collection of D-day color photos from Life Magazine

See  Bookworm’s post from 2012, and  Michael Kennedy’s photos from 2007

The Battle of Midway took place from June 4 through June 7, 1942. Bookworm attended  a Battle of Midway commemoration event  in 2010 and also in 2011:  Our Navya sentimental service in a cynical society.

See also  Sgt Mom’s History Friday post  from 2014.

Women building airplanes during WWII, in color  and  the story of the Willow Run bomber plant.

A very interesting piece on  the radio news coverage of the invasion

However, I am very sorry that this link needs to be included:   From Sacrificing FOR Freedom to Choosing the Sacrifice OF Freedom.   And this morning, one of the first things I ran across was this.   Real late-Weimar / early-Third Reich stuff.

A lot of pushback seems to be building.   Let us hope it is not too late.

Ukraine, and the World Outside US Borders

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worse and more simplistic ‘debate’ than the arguments taking place in the US over aid to Ukraine. There are big quality problems with the level of argumentation…on both sides.

On the anti-funding-Ukraine side: Many commentators say we shouldn’t be funding Ukraine’s efforts to protect their own border because we are failing in protecting our own border.

But can anyone really think that the problems with the US border are primarily a matter of resources?   It should be obvious that these problems are a matter of will: the border is largely open because the Biden administration has wanted it open.   If the Biden administration had been provided with $X billion more available for border enforcement, where X is any number, the situation would have been exactly what it has been.

On the pro-funding-Ukraine side: Many commentators seem unable to imaging why anyone would object to US participation in the war (even if only in the form of aid and weapons) other than being a Putin advocate and/or being paid off by Putin–there are a lot of ad hominem arguments accusing people of being in the pay of Putin, or simply of caring about Russia more than they care about their own country.   But there are wars and injustices all over the world, and the US must carefully choose which ones it gets involved in.   Resources are finite, and almost every military intervention carries at least some risk of undesired escalation. US experience with wars in recent decades has not been terribly encouraging.

On the anti-funding-Ukraine side: Sometimes, the argument goes beyond the US border and the assertion is made that the US should not be doing things like the Ukraine involvement until our own country is fixed.   But will there ever be, has there ever been, a time when everything about the US is ‘fixed’?   I note that the US maintained a higher level of military funding (as a % of GDP)  during the Cold War than we do today, and yet public infrastructure–from roads to parks to subway systems to school–generally worked better than the corresponding entities do today.

Also on the anti side, it is observed that there is a lot of corruption in Ukraine, and that it is also far from a perfect democracy. These points seem to be true.   But sometimes one needs to support certain countries despite serious differences in values…as we did in supporting the Soviet Union in WWII and in supporting certain unpleasant regimes during the Cold War. The specific situation needs to be considered and analyzed. (And, Indeed, some of the things now going on in Canada and in Western Europe–not to mention in America itself–seem quite contrary to American ideals.)

Those opposed to funding Ukraine often assert that the aid is being provided in order to support American arms manufacturers–Raytheon, especially, tends to be mentioned for some reason–really, this is reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s denunciations of arms manufacturers as ‘merchants of death.’   But if the political goal was to keep arms manufacturers happy, there are plenty of other projects available, such as the badly-needed building of more ships for the Navy.   And when people denounce arms manufacturers, I always wonder: Are they absolute pacifists? Do they favor having all arms manufacturing done by government agencies?   What would be their plan for ensuring that our forces have what they need to win conflicts and minimize their own casualties?

On the pro-funding-Ukraine side:   It is argued that if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine, he will likely invade other European countries. I think this is a very legitimate fear. But it needs to be traded off against the threats from the larger and much more economically dynamic nation of China.   I note that many of the people who harp on the threat from Russia never (or very rarely) have anything to say about China. Does investing resources in Ukraine reduce the threat of, say, a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan? If it points in the direction of reducing the threat for US credibility reasons, how does this trade off against the consumption of US munitions?

Someone said at Twitter that he doesn’t see how anyone who knows the history of the 1930s and 1940s can oppose supporting Ukraine.   But it’s not always 1939, sometimes it’s 1914.   Also, history didn’t stop at the end of the 1940s, and many people have observed the poor outcomes of US military interventions in our century, not to mention the Vietnam War.

The pro-Ukraine people, especially politicians, have been arguing that the money spent mostly goes to US arms manufacturers…this is kind of the flip side of the “it’s all to benefit Raytheon” argument.   If the only objective is to “create jobs” and “put money in circulation”, then that could be achieved equally well by paying people to dig ditches and then fill them up again. There has to be some other benefit.

On the anti-funding Ukraine side, there actually are some people who glorify Russia…not the majority of the anti-Ukraine people, certainly not enough to support a generalized ad hominem argument against the antis–but there are indeed some in that category. The argument that Russia under its current regime is the defender of civilization is not to my mind a very convincing one, unless one’s definition of ‘civilization’ is a pretty strange one. The main effect of these people has been to further poison the entire debate.

Above and beyond the particular issue of Ukraine: there is a world beyond US borders. We don’t get to call ‘time’ just because we have serious internal issues.   When France and Britain decided not to intervene at the time of the German Rhineland incursion in 1936, one of the arguments made by some French politicians was that it would be unwise to interfere with the economic recovery. How did that work out for them?

My own view: We do need to be supporting Ukraine, and we should be doing so a lot more effectively than the Biden administration has chosen to do.   Biden’s initial reaction to the invasion–suggesting that it might be OK if Putin didn’t take too big a bite, and then offering Zelinsky a ticket out–didn’t exactly sound a Churchillian note of defiance. Arms supply has been too little, too late, and not nearly enough has been done to increase US defense-industrial output potential, especially of consumables such as artillery shells and missiles, and to provide better supply-chain resilience against components and materials cutoffs by other countries.   My sense is that the Biden strategy is not to achieve a Ukraine victory, or to force a negotiated settlement on favorable terms, but to drag the war out with the goal of bleeding Russia while minimizing domestic political risk…a cynical and cruel strategy, in my opinion.

The main purpose of this post, though, is not to argue for or against any particular policy, but rather to express concern and disappointment…even dismay…over the extremely poor quality of the arguments being made on both sides of the issue and the generally toxic tone of the debate.

Heartsignals (updated)

Various types of communications media…letters, telegrams, telephone calls…have long played a role in popular music. Just for some weekend fun, here are some songs, ranging from the light-hearted to the very sad, in which various forms of communication make an appearance.

Conventional Mail:

Please Mr Postman, The Marvelettes (1961)

Return to Sender,  Elvis Presley (1962)

Unconventional Mail:

The Carrier Dove,  (1836)

Telegraph:

Western Union, The Five Americans, 1967

Telephone:

Sylvia’s Mother, Dr Hook (1972) (also recorded by  Bon Jovi  in 2003)

Memphis, Tennessee, Chuck Berry/Johnny Rivers (1963/1964)

Operator, Jim Croce (1972)

Missing You, John Waite (1984)(also recorded with Alison Krauss in 2007)

Why Haven’t I Heard from You?, Reba McIntire (1994)

Telephone: Lady Gaga (2009)

Telephone Line:   Electric Light Orchestra

Broadcast Radio:

Border Radio, Dave Alvin   (also this version)

Marine Radio:

Ship to Shore, Chris De Burgh

Newspapers and Magazines:

Escape (The Pina Colada Song), Rupert Holmes

My True Confession, Brook Benton

How about e-mail and text messaging?…are there any good songs featuring these media?

Here is a collection of songs featuring e-mail that I found…haven’t listened to them all. There are quite a few songs referring to text messaging, haven’t found any particularly impressive ones so far.

This post is an updated version of my earlier post on the same theme: fixed some broken links and added some communications types.