Just thinkin' about things
Thursday, August 29, 2002Tonight we had a choir rehearsal for a 9/11 memorial service. One of the pieces will be the Wilhousky arrangement of the Battle Hymn of the Republic for men's voices. Unfortunately, we are making a small change to the words that has become more or less traditional in recent years ...as He died to make men holy, let us die live to make men free.
Changing die to live cheapens the commitment and sacrifice the song is about. Sung this way, it seems to say we are all for freedom, so long as it doesn't cost a life somewhere along the way. It sounds too much like the letter from a USA TODAY reader a few months ago:
If giving up my rights prevents one death,one tragedy or one more Sept. 11,it is a price I will gladly pay.
Over the past two hundred years, hundreds of thousands of Americans have paid for our freedom with their lives. That is the price of liberty, and if we are no longer willing to pay it when necessary, we will lose it.
Just learned a new word on CNN, while the wife was channel surfing. That's right, the wife. The word was incentivize, as in "The soda companies are incentivizing schools to sells soft drinks by giving them a lager commission." And I thought we had gone too far with incenting.
Camille Paglia says the left has gone off course:
But the Left still doggedly invokes paradigms from early industrialisation, applicable today only to the Third World. It finds “oppression” under every rock and reduces contemporary society to rote battles of the “powerful” and the “powerless”.
The Left is wilfully blind to the enormous contributions that capitalism has made to democracy and individualism. Over the past two centuries capitalism has raised the standard of living and enhanced the health and life expectancy for untold millions in the West and elsewhere. It has stimulated new ideas and fostered free speech.
When they call for the redistribution of wealth, leftists are endorsing an authoritarian system that, wherever it has been tried, has resulted in economic stagnation and a sapping of cultural energy. Such concentration of power in the State creates its own tyrannical master class. Without the profit motive, few are inclined to work for long. The play of the market, rather than government engineering, is more reliable for long-term job creation. When jobs are varied and plentiful, ethnic and racial tensions diminish.
She's correct, of course, but I want to know how she defines leftism. If they correct the problems she outlines, will they still be the left?
Saw the California state quarter, courtesy of Instapundit and emailed the link to my kid in Silicon Valley. He says
I like it...
Unfortunately, it would never fly. A quarter like that would be truth in
politics, and I think that's illegal.