America in the Wilderness

Tue   17 Nov 1998   15:52 by Kevin McGehee in North Pole, Alaska 0 comments [Our Times] [In the Wilderness]

Here we are. We have the most corrupt presidential administration in American history, its Commander-in-Heat happily anticipating serving out the remainder of his second term. When he leaves office, he will be eligible to collect a generous pension, have lifelong Secret Service protection, and field plenty of cushy offers from his friends in the Hollyweird Left. Undoubtedly he will be in great demand as a political fundraiser for Democratic politicians. According to the latest polls—as spun by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—opposition to congressional impeachment proceedings is at record highs. (Never mind that the poll question is, “do you approve of the way Congress has handled the Lewinsky matter?“ I want the sleazy SOB impeached, convicted, and sent to prison for life—no parole—and I disapprove strongly of the way Congress has bungled the Lewinsky matter. How much you want to bet a sizeable portion of those poll numbers reflect similar sentiments?) We have arrived in this predicament for many different and easily identifiable reasons, including a Republican-led Congress that—upon being slandered by its political opponents—threw away its compass and furled its sails, content to drift on the current rather than try to get from where we were to where we wanted to go. But by the time that happened, where we were was already pretty bad, else why would America have wanted out badly enough to kick the Democrats out of their congressional featherbeds in 1994? Another reason we are where we are is, more Americans get their news from network television than from any other source. Which means that after 1994, millions of Americans have been persuaded by distorted presentations of the news that where they thought they wanted to go, back in ‘94, was a worse place than where they already were. But an electorate whose emotions can be played like violins by Left-leaning network TV spin merchants, doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, some of the reason for Ronald Reagan’s electoral successes in 1980 and 1984, I’m sad to have to acknowledge, came about because of this very fact, and the fact that Reagan, even while appealing to the hearts and minds of those of us who still had them, was also using state-of-the-art techniques guaranteed to appeal, however subtly, to the glands of the mindless. It was all for the good, but it was still manipulation. And it showed the way for even an oafish boob like Bill Clinton to overcome the more intellectual campaigns of George Bush and Bob Dole. Let’s face it. The majority of Americans are ignorant about matters of public policy, and they like it that way. We should have figured it out from the way voter turnout has been dwindling over the years. And if anything, the non-voting majority seems smarter than the majority of those who do vote, because at least the non-voters are tacitly admitting they don’t know enough to vote the right way. Most voters decide how to vote based on things that have nothing to do with the qualities they say they want (and that informed voters do want) in elected leaders. You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Post-modern America is a country completely separated from its history. It is a new regime, built on the manipulation of unfathomable volumes of information by unscrupulous people and institutions with their own political axes to grind—and those axes almost always cut sharply to the Left. Rush Limbaugh? Rupert Murdoch? Mere afterthoughts, capable of flourishing on the hunger of millions of Americans for real news and information, but unable to effect change because their audiences are a large but increasingly irrelevant minority. As for the screed that Big Media is owned by corporations whose CEOs, being capitalists, must be conservative, that’s all just so much hooey. Although conservative by temperament, the typical corporate critter is sufficiently worldly to realize that the status quo in the 1990s isn’t ideologically conservative (film at 11). And since change can be bad (just ask the genius who dreamed up the New Coke), ideological conservatism is to be shunned except when the status quo starts to look worse. It wasn’t Reagan’s conservatism, nor his pro-America optimism, nor any of that, that brought corporate America to support Reagan in the 1980s—it was that huge misery index caused by Carter-nomics. It hit the bottom-line hard enough that corporate inertia had to give way to the need for change. Today corporate America gives generously to causes (including Bill Clinton) that are avowedly hostile to capitalism precisely because, as the Four Horsemen keep saying, the economy is doing passably well under the status quo. Corporate CEOs ideologically conservative?? Where do you think those “blueblood country-club moderate Republicans” come from? Happy Acres Trailer Park? Post-modern America is a new regime, occupying the space formerly occupied by the constitutionally governed federal republic established by the Founding Fathers and defended to the point of civil war by the Great Emancipator. Somewhere in our recent past the America they lived in was overthrown and replaced with the present one. It wasn’t done as a result of a one-worlder conspiracy or some kind of deliberate scheme, but it was done. Don’t blame it on the Bilderbergers or the Rockefellers or the Queen of England. They’re just scapegoats trotted out every so often to distract us from the real culprit. If you want to know who did this, every adult man and woman in America, from the GenX slacker to the AARP footsoldier, needs only to do one very simple thing. Look in the mirror. Even those of us who don’t think we’re responsible, even if we’re sure we have done everything right and opposed every scheme that promised to turn our nation into this mass of wreckage, we all have to accept a share of the responsibility. After all, by living in post-modern America, we’re certainly reaping a share of the consequences. We sent our kids to public school and just assumed the education they got would be right. We bought a TV and just assumed it would always be a wholesome influence in our homes. We let it babysit our kids. As teenagers, we went along with the gang when they went hunting for sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, and joined in the catcalls against anyone who admonished us not to be so wild. To this day, we make fun of churchgoing women who always do their top collar buttons. As single young men in the 1970s, many of us decided legalized abortion would make it easier for us to “get lucky”. As married men, some of us decided it was good to lie about our extramarital affairs—apparently the possibility of not having affairs never came up. Trust and respect have become something people demand (and give) sight-unseen, not something to be earned. Self-esteem is cultivated in people who have no self-respect and no reason to have it. Public health policy caters to the hormones rather than the public health. We are in the wilderness, and we have no Moses to lead us out of it—and too many of us lack any desire to be led out of it. Biblical literalists may be excused for concluding that these are the last days. How will the irreligious explain it to themselves?

Mainstream Values Under Attack

Wed   21 Oct 1998   10:47 by Kevin McGehee in North Pole, Alaska 0 comments [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

Probably you saw the lines of questioning on morning shows like NBC’s “Today,“ trying to pin responsibility for Matthew Shepard’s monstrous torture-murder on Christian groups that claim homosexuality can be cured. Or maybe you’re unfortunate enough to live in a town like Billings, Montana whose newspaper has editorialized that widespread bias in favor of heterosexuality contributed to the atrocity. Despite the fact that Shepard’s own father has pleaded that his son’s death not be exploited to advance a political agenda, the lifestyle ghouls know no decency. Mainstream moral values are as always the greatest enemy in their world, and any opportunity to attack them must be seized, even at the expense of causing pain to a gay murder victim’s family. Here in Alaska, where a constitutional amendment is before voters that will specifically define marriage as a union between one man and one woman, the danger that Shepard’s cruel murder would be exploited to argue against the amendment is high. So far the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has stated no opinion of its own on the issue, but it did print an editorial from an Illinois paper opposing such exploitation. Letters to the editor in the News-Miner against Ballot Measure 2 have nevertheless been venomous in attacking mainstream Alaskans who may support it. I usually avoid USENET newsgroups, but recently out of curiosity I visited one devoted to the question of impeaching President Clinton. A common thread in the statements by Clinton defenders, usually stated in tones of outright glee, was that the President’s critics are vainly trying to defend a long-dead concept of sexual morality that frowns on such things as adultery. Geraldo Rivera, one of the President’s staunchest defenders on network television, admitted in his autobiography to having bedded, even while married or otherwise involved, nearly every woman he ever worked with; Rivera’s tack on Clinton is that he’s being persecuted over a “sex lie.“ Clearly more than just our Constitution and the Rule of Law are at issue in the Lewinsky matter. Every aspect of mainstream sexual morality is regarded with hostility, every victory over mainstream values serves as another rung up the ladder to the ultimate destruction of that hated morality. Hate and homophobia are not imaginary hobgoblins—the Shepard murder and such protest signs as “AIDS Cures Gays” are proof enough of that. The question is whether such phenomena justify the concerted and consistent effort by lifestyle ghouls across America to dismantle every single, solitary element of mainstream values. Nor can the Shepard murder necessarily be laid exclusively at the doorstep of homophobia; given their drunkenness at the time of the killing, and their obvious disregard for life, the two petty monsters in Wyoming might very well have chosen some other prospective victim, for some other “reason,“ had Matthew Shepard not crossed their path first. But for Shepard’s misfortune, it might even have been a racial killing, or a rape-murder—or they might have killed someone for having attended a different school; those two men were time-bombs of hate looking for an excuse to go off, as such monsters usually are. Those who blame mainstream values for Matthew Shepard’s murder, or for abortion clinic bombings or anything else, overlook the fact that hate and murder are not mainstream values (much though they would like to make them out to be, in order to indict the whole concept of morality), and that laws against murder—such as the ones in Wyoming that define the Shepard killing as a capital offense inviting the death penalty—are there because of mainstream values. Mainstream America isn’t gloating over the fact that Matthew Shepard is dead. Far from it. The only ones coming close to gloating are hateful monsters—including those who try to exploit the murder for political benefit.

Tale of the Tape: Reagan vs. Clinton

Thu   17 Sep 1998   9:10 by Kevin McGehee in North Pole, Alaska 0 comments [Humor?] [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

Reagan: The Great Communicator Clinton: The Great Prevaricator Reagan: “America: a Superpower and Proud of It!“ Clinton: “America: Morally Bankrupt and Proud of It!“ Reagan: “There you go again.“ Clinton: Here we go again. Reagan: “Trickle-down” economics Clinton: Trickle-down DNA samples Reagan: Age and experience Clinton: Youth and treachery Reagan: Respected by his enemies Clinton: Despised by his friends Reagan: Won the Cold War… Clinton: ...and then surrendered Reagan: “Shining city on a hill” Clinton: Dark hallway next to the Oval Office Reagan: Greatest President of the 20th Century Clinton: Worst President of all time [By May 2007, Jimmy Carter seems to have reclaimed the mantle awarded Clinton in that last line—but largely on the strength of his actions and words as a former president. So, who knows for sure…?]

The Funniest of the Funniest (Not)

Mon   18 May 1998   6:44 by Kevin McGehee in North Pole, Alaska 0 comments [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

Ever since Bob Saget first went on Sunday night television with “America’s Funniest Home Videos,“ one of the mainstays of TV comedy has been mishaps suffered by ordinary people and caught on video. Now that Saget has been replaced on his old show by a pair of so-hip-they-need-to-be-shot-through-the-head GenXers, Fox’s “World’s Funniest” has taken over the Sunday evening chore of showing truly funny incidents of John Q. American making a fool of himself in front of a camera. Last night (May 17), “World’s Funniest” put Jim Brown (not the football player) in a tuxedo so he could announce the year’s “Funniest of the Funniest”—which turned out to be a small boy named Eric who ate his mother’s entire pan of brownies and, when caught, looked her (and the camcorder) right in the eye and practiced the White House strategy: deny, deny, deny, with an occasional dash of evasion (“There’s a green ball right here.“) and transparent alibi-making (“A bird pecked at it.“). The humor, I suppose, was in having a kid—caught all but red-handed, mind you—run through all the evasions and lies that we’ve come to expect in this day and age. We can certainly hope the little brat’s backside smoked for days after the camera was turned off, but that was never specified. At least Saget would have had the lucky “winners” in the studio and would have asked about the felon-in-training’s punishment, if any. On the Fox show, the “winners” were AWOL (probably never even invited—they’re also not seen on the regular episodes either, when a “best” video is chosen and announced at the end), and though Brown acknowledged that Eric’s mother must have been pretty mad at the time, the lesson that would have been picked up by small children watching the show would have been very Clintonesque. I don’t know about you, but it’s always seemed to me that even Saget’s show was prone to glorifying childish misbehavior—more often than not on that show, if even one of the contenders involved such a display (tantrum, obvious lying, assault on a sibling, etc.), that video was chosen as the week’s funniest. Perhaps that’s why Saget always made sure to mention punishment in the interviews. But when the “funniest” video of an entire year on Brown’s program showcases Slick Eric, we can certainly see where America gets the idea that doing wrong, and lying about it, is no big deal. We can hope that, for stealing brownies and lying about it, Eric got a punishment fitting the crimes. Now if we could just persuade America to do the same with Bill Clinton…

‘Peace Poles’—Some Prayers Are PC After All

Mon   27 Apr 1998   6:40 by Kevin McGehee in North Pole, Alaska 0 comments [Alaska] [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

Fairbanks fairly bristles with “peace poles” these days. There’s one at the Fairbanks North Star Borough administrative center, one at the state building downtown, probably several on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, and one at the federal building where my wife works for the National Weather Service. These peace poles are the product of something called the World Peace Prayer Society, a PC group started in Japan that believes peace is worth struggling for. The poles bear the message, “May peace prevail on earth,“ in English and other languages. Fairbanks has several of these peace poles, but North Pole has only one, and it is not yet on display. That’s because North Pole’s mayor, Baptist minister Tim Peters, claims that erecting the pole on city property would violate the current nonsensical standard with respect to the separation of church and state. Peters is probably more interested in making a point about U.S. constitutional law than about the peace poles, but the poles themselves bear some examination. As noted, the group responsible for the poles considers peace something worth struggling for. Yet peace can be dirt cheap, and can even be undesirable under certain circumstances. Unlike all men, all peace is not created equal. Peace can be found in many places, by many means. In a Quaker community. In a cemetery. In a town free of internal corruption. A man at peace with his place in the world need fear no conflict from outside, no matter how fearsome its consequences may be to him. Peace never requires struggle, and often doesn’t even demand an effort—after all, the peace of the grave comes eventually to all of us. Freedom, on the other hand, is precious. It can only be achieved and maintained through the investment of lives each freely given by the donor. While peace is essentially a state of mind, freedom is a state among men. No peace worth having can be achieved where freedom does not already abide. The “peace poles” of the World Peace Prayer Project are an example of the victory of symbolism over substance. They are sappy, empty, meaningless gestures. They are mind candy for the sophisticated ignorant who run America these days. Far more worthy to be displayed in their place would be replicas of the Liberty Bell, bearing the words, “Let Freedom Ring.“

Where Are the Media???

Mon   6 Apr 1998   15:43 by Kevin McGehee in North Pole, Alaska 0 comments [Humor?] [Our Times] [My Two Cents]

This morning my wife stopped me from committing a potentially fatal mistake. There I was, foolishly about to handle a seemingly innocuous household item, when she informed me that what I held in my hand was responsible for the greatest percentage of emergency-room visits in America. I froze, gaping in terror at the monstrous thing that had come within a hair’s breadth of causing me huge bodily harm, even—dare I say it?—mortal injury. More dangerous than guns, more dangerous than cars, power tools, caustic chemicals, or cigarettes. More dangerous even than being a close personal friend of Bill Clinton. As I carefully put down this ticking time bomb of grievous hurt, I was struck not only by my own narrow escape, but by the ready availability of these items—for they can be purchased in bulk for a few dollars, with neither a permit nor a safety certificate required, and having no minimum age limit. Any six-year-old can go to a retailer near you and buy half a dozen of these things, and no one will think twice about it! Slowly I backed away from it, cold sweat on my forehead, and one single question reverberated through my panic-stricken mind: Why haven’t the news media warned us about these things? Well, I’m not going to rely on the news media anymore. I’m going to spread the word myself, starting now. If you care as deeply about safety as I do (and what kind of human being are you if you don’t?), then you must join me in banishing this unreported public health menace from American life. Only a few hours ago I was on the verge of slicing one of these malignant tools of mass destruction to be toasted, unaware that the savory, unprepossessing snack I thought I was about to have, might have been my last. I was lucky—but thousands of innocent Americans every year aren’t so lucky. They find themselves with ghastly wounds pouring forth their precious life’s blood, having to be rushed to the nearest trauma center before they perish. Spouses, siblings and children are exposed to a gruesome spectacle that undoubtedly desensitizes them to such violence and turns them into callous, cold-blooded killers by the millions. And all because of the heartless calculations of a few profit-mongers ensconced safely in their multimillion-dollar mansions where no such weapon can ever intrude. The time is now. No more blood for profit. It’s time to BAN THE BAGEL.

Constitutional Scholarship Piles Up for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Wed   3 Jan 1996   6:50 by Kevin McGehee in North Pole, Alaska 0 comments [Our Times] [The Armed Genius]

“When large numbers of citizens begin arming against their own government and are ready to believe even the silliest rumors about that government’s willingness to evade the Constitution, there is a problem that goes beyond gullibility. This country’s political establishment should think about what it has done to inspire such distrust—and what it can do to regain the trust and loyalty of many Americans who no longer grant it either.“ That was what Glenn Harlan Reynolds, an associate law professor at the University of Tennessee, wrote in a commentary for the Chicago Tribune that was published on Jan. 30, 1995. Although it pre-dated the Oklahoma City bombing by almost three months, that comment can easily serve as the perfect rejoinder to efforts by pro-control advocates to use that bombing in an effort to discredit those of us who have such concerns. Reynolds is one of the many thoughtful Americans who have determined that the Second Amendment does indeed mean what it says; he wrote one of the articles published in last spring’s issue of the Tennessee Law Review,  a symposium on the Second Amendment.  This symposium, which your editor obtained only just in time to review for this issue, is a classic illustration of what I have been saying since The Armed Genius began publication three years ago: that the weight of intelligent argument is on our side, and the momentum of the debate would turn our way and wash away our opponent’s every pretense of objection. Lest any pro-controller dismiss Reynolds out of hand, I will note that his law degree comes from Yale—the same school that produced pro-control darling Bill Clinton. Yet clearly Prof. Reynolds has chosen the path of honest scholarship in our Constitution and its underlying principles. In contrast, he notes that “it is probably fair to say that those who support gun control have generally tended either to ignore the Second Amendment entirely or to adopt an interpretation that leaves it entirely without effect.“ Prof. Reynolds’ article is the second in the symposium issue, titled “A Critical Guide to the Second Amendment.“ It discusses the two predominant views of the amendment in today’s America: the pro-freedom “Standard Model,“ and the collectivist view, and finds that the former is at least rooted in things that can be verified: the amendment’s own text and the true historical underpinnings of the right to keep and bear arms. To someone accustomed to reading the balderdash lofted as “scholarship” by advocates of control, Reynolds’ conclusion comes as a breath of fresh air: “[T]he states’ rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, which pays little attention to text, history, or structural sense, is not really constitutional law. It is simply a slogan.“ How’s that for ammunition? Reynolds does not simply arrive at this conclusion on the basis of sentiment. His examination of the two models draws upon extensive recent scholarship and on a great deal of historical substantiation with which many of you are already familiar. Reynolds refers to Don Kates’ 1983 Michigan Law Review article, “Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment,“ and Sanford Levinson’s slightly better known article, “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,“ which first appeared in the Yale Law Journal in 1989, noting that since the appearance of these there seems to have been a flood of similar articles upholding the pro-freedom position. Meanwhile, as Kates himself noted in an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court not long ago, the pro-control scholarship has been little more than activist boilerplate. Prof. Reynolds finds that the precursor to our Second Amendment is a provision in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which recognized the right to keep and bear arms. The professor adds that Standard Model scholars “stress that the right…was seen as serving two purposes. First, it allowed individuals to defend themselves from outlaws of all kinds—not only ordinary criminals, but also soldiers and government officials who exceeded their authority, for in the legal and philosophical framework of the time no distinction was made between the two. Just as importantly, the presence of an armed populace was seen as a check on government tyranny and on the power of a standing army.“ No distinction between officials overstepping their authority and ordinary criminals! Truly, an enlightened age! Then there’s this priceless, terse comment: “[A]s William Van Alstyne points out, the ‘right of the people’ described in the Second Amendment is ‘to keep and bear arms,‘ not to belong to a militia.“ Reynolds does afford pro-control advocates their fair shot at making their case, but they do make a hash of it. In examining David Williams’ objection, “The Terrifying Second Amendment,“ Reynolds finds an individual-rights critic who starts from within the “Standard Model.“ While Williams accepts the universality of the militia mentioned in the amendment, he objects that gun owners today are no more universal than the National Guard, so that the idea of gun owners as a militia is every bit as flawed (in Williams’ view) as the National Guard idea. Williams also “argues that the ideal of the militia was founded on notions of public service and widespread virtue that are not present today. In the absence of these ‘conditions precedent,‘ the basic purpose of the Second Amendment cannot be fulfilled.“ Reynolds, however, counters that Williams’ analysis “is one of those arguments that ‘proves too much.‘ If the failure of universality and public-spiritedness means that the Second Amendment’s rights are now passé, then it is hard to see why the jury system should not go too.“ Or, for that matter, the practice of holding elections. Williams’ objection seems the most challenging one Reynolds finds, as the rest seem to spring from the collectivist view. To cover those, he quotes from Stephen Halbrook’s famous book, That Every Man Be Armed: “In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the ‘collective’ right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of ‘the people’ to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.“ Why, then, does the pro-control view continue to have such influence among the media and academic elites of today? A partial answer is that there is so little Supreme Court precedent on the question. Until this century, when the collectivist view began to appear in arguments for, among other things, the “Sullivan Law” in New York, the U.S. Supreme Court had no cause to be questioned on the meaning of the Second Amendment. There was such a consensus—as Halbrook’s observation makes plain—that it would have been one of history’s great wastes of time and energy to ask the highest court in the land to ratify it. Not that the high court has been silent, as we well know; it simply has not ruled definitively. Yet. The Spring 1995 symposium issue of the Tennessee Law Review has been widely distributed by pro-freedom organizations, but if you have not obtained a copy you might write to Micki Fox, Business Manager, Tennessee Law Review, 915 Volunteer Blvd., College of Law—Dunford Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996-4070, for information. In either case, do try to read it—and have a highlighter pen handy. It’ll be more fun than you might think.

I’m a Cyberspace Hypocrite

Sat   1 Jul 1995   11:15 by Kevin McGehee in Fairbanks, Alaska 0 comments [Our Times] [The Armed Genius]

Yes, I admit it. I didn’t take e-mail seriously until I obtained the capability for it myself. Some of you tried to give me your e-mail addresses, but I blew it off by pointing out that I wasn’t online, so e-mail wasn’t important. Now that I’m on CompuServe, I’ve changed my tune. It’s not quite as bad as a Republican congressman flip-flopping on term limits as soon as his party wins the majority in both houses, but it comes pretty @#$!! close. This is my confession: I’m a cyberspace hypocrite. Having exchanged e-mail with some people and joined CompuServe’s forum on firearms, I realize that being online can be a major convenience, as well as a means for quickly exercising my rights as an American citizen. I have sought, unsuccessfully, to e-mail my congressman, but settled for telling Newt Gingrich’s office they could feel free to use my name (for what it’s worth) to pressure my congressman into joining the information age. Now that I know how wrong I’ve been about e-mail, I want very much to rectify the situation. So I’m requesting now that any RKBA member who is connected to the Internet, either directly—or at least, as directly as is possible, given the realities of the ‘Net—or through a service like CompuServe or America Online, to contact me via e-mail so that I will have your online addresses. I also ask that you let me know if you have any objection to your e-mail addresses being made available to other RKBA members. I envision the e-mail information being included in the annual member address list, absent any objections. Those whose computers are online around the clock may have understandable concerns even though the members of this SIG are, without exception, the salt of the earth. Having an e-mail box at CompuServe means alerts and information you send me can arrive in minutes instead of days, and if it’s especially pressing I may be able to relay it to those SIG members who are online mere minutes after you’ve sent it to me. Those who are not on CompuServe can e-mail me through the Internet; my CompuServe address formatted for the Internet is . [Editor’s note, May 2007: of course, that email address is long since obsolete and invalid; the link goes to my present-day email address instead.] You can also submit articles for The Armed Genius, if they are brief enough to make it through the CompuServe portal (upper limit, 50,000 words). However, be advised that CompuServe bills the recipient “postage” for Internet-originated e-mail.

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