WHEN THE BRITISH SPEAK, EUROPE CRINGES!

WHEN THE BRITISH SPEAK, EUROPE CRINGES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 19, 2009

“This is the excellent foppery of the world! That, when we are sick in fortune, we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting.”

Shakespeare

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A READER WRITES (ATTACHING AN ARTICLE BY A BRITISH JOURNALIST)

Jim,

This guy writes almost as well as you do. Care to comment?

Phil

PS This is a very telling article from a British journalist. This is some insight into what the world thinks of our politics here in the US. All I can say is WOW! What follows is an interesting article written for the London Daily Mail by Peter Hitchens, a famous British author and journalist, and interestingly a political independent. We certainly don't manage our affairs in the US in accordance with Brit opinion, but it's always a good idea to know of the opinion of others previously proven of merit; he prompts valid questions of both liberals and conservatives.

He was in the USA on election night and wrote of his impressions. Like him or laugh at him, Hitchens remains popular throughout the world because many citizens of the globe think as he does. Some of you will nod your heads in agreement as you read it; others will frown; and still others will do both. Let's all hope that Mr. Hitchens' "wave goodbye to America" is premature.

THE ARTICLE:

THE NIGHT WE WAVED GOODBYE TO AMERICA

© Peter Hitchens, London Daily Mail, November 10, 2008

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernize Heaven and Hell - or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilization. At least Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is focused on a man who actually did something. I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one, which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to
facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers, which recorded Obama’s victory, have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books, and Obama calendars, and if there isn't yet a children's picture version of his story, there soon will be. Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left wing machine politician is a sort of secular savior, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliché-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America 's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton's stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan He really did talk about a 'new dawn', and a 'timeless creed' (which was 'yes, we can'). He proclaimed that 'change has come'. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what 'enormity' means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr. Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more > toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home!).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated - but rather hesitant - invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will - 'Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder 'Yes, we can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He'd have been better off bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidized slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King - in schools, streets, neighborhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joints. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr. Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr. Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs that are the lots of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination program aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them. And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

I was in Washington, DC the night of the election. America 's beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street - which runs due north from the White House - the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one, which is in many ways much more important.

I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan. As I walked, I crossed another of Washington 's secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique. These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America 's conservative party - the Republicans - to fight on the cultural and moral fronts. They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Phil,

It has always intrigued me that Great Britain, which doesn’t have an economy to match California, and doesn’t have enough wind to blow down a paper hut, can still stand above the fray with the delusional stance of superiority when the British currency and “The Royal Crown” represent an anachronistic breach with the Continent. To think the Brits speak for Europe is beyond delusional as the Continent is more than the English Channel away.

Shakespeare understood this predilection (see quotation above) and made swift cant of it, which is to say, the British are long on style and short on substance. They talk good but they don’t walk the talk too well.

I should say at the outset I'm no great admirer of the British. I've seen what they have done to native people about the globe. I don't know if Peter Hitchens is related to Christopher Hitchens who is of the far left, and quite a critic of the United States. Yet, C. Hitchens seems to be such an admirer of the United States that he became an American citizen. Certain Americans seem to love these Brits who appeal to their collective masochism. Now, that is what is sad.

As for a diatribe against president-elect Barak Obama, I say let's give him a chance. It is ironic and may prove prophetic that he has more than a symbolic connection to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had no administrative experience when he became President, and his military experience consisted of a captaincy in the Black Hawk War, in which he never saw any live combat fighting Indians.

As we all know, Lincoln proved himself a sound strategist against the enemy as well as against his own generals, who were pathetic until that man from Galena, Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant took over.

Lincoln suffered through the hesitations of General George McClellan, which for me was so painful and frustrating to read a century and a half later that I'd have rung the arrogant bastards neck. Lincoln, who always had a way with words, once said about McClellan that sending reinforcements was like shoving fleas across a barnyard so few of them seemed to get there.

Not to dwell on Lincoln's attributes, but Obama enters a dual war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and will be severely tested by the established military as well as established voices in Congress, as was Lincoln. The Great Emancipator suffered through another incompetent in general Joe Hooker, who wanted to set up a military dictatorship under the nose of the novice president. Lincoln, like Obama eloquent beyond measure with a rare intelligence schooled as an outsider, flung a challenge at Hooker:

"Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship."

I have written much about leadership over the years, and I have always smiled to myself when I’ve thought about such men as Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. They weren't programmed with polite manners and pecking order politics. They were programmed to life and survival of the fittest. Struggle and pain was the oxygen of their existence.

They both made mistakes, both were vilified for being too one-sided or too hard. Both were called tyrants for suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning dissidents, but both never took their eye off the ball of what was important and what was not.

Each was his own man. Jackson was totally a man of action. Lincoln was a man of eloquence who knew how to use action. Lincoln's answer to his accusers of being a tyrant was magnificent:

"I expect to maintain this contest (Civil War) until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress, or the country forsake me."

Beyond the triumphs of his leadership, Lincoln retained a special genius, not of strategy, although he was a great strategist, not even of politics, although he was a consummate politician barring none, but the genius of being a person, a tall, gaunt and melancholy man, who kept his own counsel because he had a moral center and a working compass that never failed him in his all too short journey in life.

This country needed an outsider, then, someone who had endured and triumphed over the duplicity, the chicanery, the hypocrisy of a people out of touch with the times, itself and the world which was moving away from it. Lincoln's time was not unlike ours. Is Barak Obama that man? We shall see.

Lincoln said, "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free." To him, the American cause was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit of all." Nearly two centuries later, we are in that dawn.

I am currently writing a book titled CONFIDENT THINKING attempting to take some measure of our times and wider issues. I feel we have lost something possibly now found. We shall see. This is an excerpt from the book:

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EXCERPT from CONFIDENT THINKING:


Change is the God of The Machine. There isn't an institution that doesn't deaden if not kill our spirit because of the constant cacophony of its perpetual motion. There is no place or time for our inner world. The Machine in me says, when I have a pain, "It hurts," not that, "I hurt." Yet, when I express happiness, I say, "I am happy," not that, "It is happy." When I am depressed, I say, "I am gloomy," not that, "It is gloomy." We leave The Machine behind when it comes to feelings. My wonder, are we afraid to feel?

Feelings, like perceptions, are intentional. Perception, as Colin Wilson puts it, is a sculptor, a molder of reality. We leave the conformist, the pleaser, driven by The Machine, and take charge. But alas, how rare taking charge is.

The Machine is our left-brain or cognitive mind. It not only dominates our world, but also is obsessed with a personal world when it is the impersonal world, or right brain thinking, that gets beyond our one-dimensional existence. This sounds bleak but it is because we confuse the impersonal with left-brain or objective value-free analysis. Colin Wilson writes in "Access to Inner Worlds" (1983):

"Intelligence has developed in association with the need for alertness, for scanning the external world for problems and threats. In short, intelligence sprang from a sense of urgency. And now the urgency has diminished, and man can afford to relax and enjoy this magnificent civilization he has created, he finds it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency."

James Hillman describes this in "A Terrible Love of War" (2004), as sponsoring an impossible collection of murder and soldierly comradeship, torture and religious conviction, the destruction of earth and patriotism, annihilation of enemies and a passion for hope, all of which makes war a normal expression of the collective conscience.

The Machine would argue, what about 9/11, what about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China? What about the Great Depression of 2008? What about the global meltdown caused by the subprime real estate debacle? What about the genocide in the Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Somalia, and Rwanda? What about all these developments? What choice do we have?

The Machine fails to see it is programmed to be solution driven, not problem directed. It keeps generating answers and storing them in its archives too preoccupied to anticipate and deal with problems before they become "urgencies."

These urgencies are all outcomes of neglected processes. We are stuck because we have stayed the same as long as we could, missed the changes too preoccupied to notice, preferred to describe, debate and dissolve our problems in hesitation rhetoric than to face them, and then we have left the future up for grabs to be resolved with crisis management, which is always too little too late.

Self-contentment is anathema to progress. With self-contentment, there is a fullness of the spirit, which knows no feeling of want or poverty. It is in a happy marriage with nature, and uses the knowledge of its inner world to connect first with itself and then with others. We are never alone when we are "al one ness."

Loneliness is the empty world of constant seeking of outside reassurance. It is a violent disruptive world, a world that needs change for change's sake, seldom considering what is lost for what is gained. Nothing can be left undone, as there is a constant drive to escape the "central ego," the citadel of the quiet.

Wheeling from this, the reader says, "But you mix the single (individual) with the collective (society), the particular with the general; they are not the same." Oh, but they are, indeed, they are!

Anxiety spreads like the wind from one to the many, to everyone. Why else would generation after generation call its age, "The Age of Anxiety"? And why is this? It is the fault of our programming.

Modern Man's intelligence and sense of urgency created the modern world so that he could afford to relax and enjoy the magnificent civilization he has created, only to find it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency.

Human evolution has trained him for action, neither for thought nor peace, but for aggression. This has wrapped him in paradox. Confused, he has become passive and delusional with breakout patterns of fast cars, fast women, and profligate lifestyles as compensation for a self-image of being lost, mediocre and accidental. The wild beast to conquer is not "out there" but "inside."

Modern Man is like the man in Colin Wilson's metaphor in "Access to Inner Words." We find this man living out on the lawn in a tent, while building a magnificent house. Once completed, he absent-mindedly continues to live in the tent and leaves the house empty. He simply cannot overcome his programming.

That is what Modern Man has done. He has created a climate to relax but has never found the time or inclination. Indeed, he runs faster and faster. This is not a recent development.

Budd Schulberg captured this frightening mania in "What Makes Sammy Run" (1941) over a half century ago. The novel is the story of Sammy Glick who fought his way from New York's lower east side, over the bodies of his friends and mistresses to the top of the heap in Hollywood, and he could never stop running. It is a twentieth century novel but it describes the twenty-first century man to a tee, who is afraid to stop to find out who he is or why he is for fear he will lose his place in the race for good.

Man-the-Machine is in perpetual motion like the guy who has been driving all day, and who keeps waking up at night, imagining himself still behind the wheel. He is the lonely hunter uncertain of his prey. Consequently, Man-the-Machine has slipped into the insidious habit of anxiety, tension, over-alertness, and always being on, craving connection to fill a void that only exists because he is afraid to stop.

Some reading this may declare that they take care of themselves physically, earn a living, build a business or profession, manage a family and otherwise conduct themselves with much success in public and private affairs, so who's to say I'm not in control?

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Reading this, you can understand why Lincoln and Jackson, and now Obama are on my radar.

CONFIDENT THINKING, should it get published, and there are no guarantees when someone writes because he must, and worries not at all about the publishing end until it is finished. My writing may seem too serious too intent and too contentious. It might be all of these. But I sense we are waiting for another 9/11 when the real danger is not material combustion but psychological and emotional implosion. If you read history, no nation or civilization has ever been destroyed from "without," but always "within."

Be always well,

Jim