Monstrous

But this is the antithesis of President Obama's vision of a new Constitution (or a new Bill of Rights) that proclaims what government must do for you rather than what it cannot do to you. Alas, as I've discussed before, while that sounds admirable it is monstrous, since government has nothing to give — it can do for one only by taking from another. If that is to be our system, we are no longer free.

-Andy McCarthy, post at The Corner

Shame and Guilt and Self-hatred

Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal. Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be. There are honest ways to confront that. You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love. Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle. And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is: an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. That’s why they demonize any opposition. To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves. Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

-Andrew Klavan, Frontpage Mag interview

Groupthink

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

-Leo Tolstoy

Setting our hair on fire

But I think the real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn't a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization's craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

-wretchard, comment 132 on this post concerning the Ft. Hood attack

Freedom from Responsibility

What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business possessed of great wealth in which all citizens had a right to share. Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result. If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms.

-Edith Hamilton

Safety First

I'm so f***ing sick of getting hurt by safety.

-Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs

Serious Business

I never kid about quiche.

-John Casey, "Chuck", Chuck Versus the Helicopter

Reading Between The Lines

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," Oscar Wilde once remarked.

Irving Kristol took Wilde’s observation and ran with it. "The amateur’s feelings are sincere enough — why else should he be writing poetry? — but he takes the writing of poetry to be more important than the poem itself," Kristol noted in his influential 1972 essay, "Symbolic Politics and Liberal Reform." "For him, writing poetry is a kind of symbolic action, in which he liberates his most earnest sentiments, and it is in this impatient action and in this instant liberation that he seeks fulfillment."

The successful poet, meanwhile, understands that good poetry is ultimately not about the experience of the author but of the reader. "He understands that a plea of sincerity is of no account in the ultimate court of literary judgment, which will look at the poem itself and simply ask: Does it work?"

"It seems to me," Kristol wrote, "that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves."

-Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online

Backwater

Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

-Mark Steyn, National Review Online

Dog-Feces Ice Cream

It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.

-Mark Steyn, National Review Online

"It won't work."

We can, however, be certain of some facts about the health care reform plan. It won't work. No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works. And that doesn't work.

-P.J. O'Rourke, on the Clinton health care reform plan, Wall Street Journal

Freedom

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. Entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights--the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery--hay and a barn for human cattle.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-P.J. O'Rourke, Speech Given to Libertarians

I fix my eyes ahead.

Prepare in urgency to race
Casting off the wieght that burdens me
I cannot dare to force the pace
Marathon for life the road I face

Commited
determined
My gaze is set on finishing

I’m straining to extend my lead
With every evil chasing me
One day, one hour, every step

I know
I know
I fix
my eyes
Ahead

Straining on to run without remorse
Casting off mistakes that came before
In my mind I see a hallowed door
Open arm embrace, I’m reaching for...

Just like a breeze is passing me
My stammers, a distant memory
We cannot afford a glance to see
What’s gaining or what is history

-The Black Brigade, Project 86, Picket Fence Cartel

Who do I belong to?

Who do I belong To?
Not Earth
Not world
Not Evil
Not mortals
Not wretches
Not horrors

Who do I belong to?
Unchanging
Unbreaking
Unfailing
Creator
Immortal
Eternal

-To Sand We Return, Project 86, Picket Fence Cartel

Squirrels would taste more like ice cream...

But there's still a problem. Yes, Biden is occasionally a truth-teller. But, just as often, he's explaining how FDR spoke to Americans on TV, years before they had television sets or — give it time — how squirrels would taste more like ice cream if goats were only taller. And again, whenever he punctures the politics as usual with an inconvenient truth, the administration forces Biden to recant, not the other way around.

-Jonah Goldberg, USA Today column 8/4/2009

Slayer

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

-D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

White

Hawkeye thought a lot of things were funny. "Let me get this right, Moony. You work mostly at night? And you dress all in white? Har-dee-har har." Thought that was a riot. Told him I don't wear white to hide myself. I wear it so they'll see me coming. So they'll know who it is. 'Cause when they see the white, it doesn't matter how good a target I am. Their hands shake so bad, they couldn't hit the moon.

-Moon Knight, on his costume, Moon Knight #1

One of the Guys

From Kirby Krackle:

Oh, somebody told me once,
you can't be a lover and a confidant
and still be a hero made of Big Orange Rocks at the same time...
Oh no!

But I, I haven't learned it yet,
I still blame it all on the accident
the big brain says I'll get fixed, but I never will
That's why I've never felt like one of the guys...

One of the Guys, One of the Guys!
That's why I've never felt like one of the guys
One of the Guys, One of the Guys!
That's why I've never felt like one of the...

Thugs, along Yancy Street,
I never saw a face I didn't wanna beat
I can't go to dinner with my girl without breaking the table,
Oh no!

My whole life, I was walking tall,
now I can't even go to the mall
They call me the ever lovin' blue eyed thing I don't wanna be
Cause I've never felt like one of the guys...

One of the Guys, One of the Guys!
That's why I've never felt like one of the guys
One of the Guys, One of the Guys!
That's why I've never felt like one of the...

I find I'm singing this refrain,
cuz I doubt this feeling will ever change
It's been like this for oh so long...
Spent my life feeling this way,
but after all this time I found, it's fed me all along
and it's made me strong...

When the time comes to end the fun,
I'm the one that gets the business done,
ain't no one in the world that can get in my way
Oh no!

I've found a place among my friends,
and I'll be there up until the end
the first family to make me forget I was so grim
That's why I finally feel like one of the guys...

One of the Guys, One of the Guys!
That's why I finally feel like one of the guys
One of the Guys, One of the Guys!
That's why I finally feel like one of the guys

So now I say it's Clobberin' Time, it's Clobberin' Time
Now it's Clobberin' Time, it's Clobberin' Time
So now I say it's Clobberin' Time, it's Clobberin' Time
Now it's Clobberin' Time, it's Clobberin' Time
So now I say it's Clobberin' Time...

Is that racist?

"Boris! Big gun is perfect for hunting moose and squirrel!"

"Yes, Natasha! Soon Moose will be stuffed and mounted over fireplace!"

Wait.

Should I do that?

Is that racist?

-Spider-Man to himself while watching Russian gangsters buy illegal weapons, Amazing Spider-Man #589

What Sort?

Let us suppose that instead of being slow, extravagant, inefficient, wasteful, unadaptive, stupid, and at least by tendency corrupt, the State changes its character entirely and becomes infinitely wise, good, disinterested, efficient, so that anyone may run to it with any little two-penny problem and have it solved for him at once in the wisest and best way possible. Suppose the state close-herds the individual so far as to forestall every conceivable weakness, incompetence; suppose it confiscates all his energy and resources and employs them much more advantageously all around than he can employ them if left to himself. My question still remains – what sort of person is the individual likely to become under those circumstances?
-Albert Jay Nock, via Jonah Goldberg

Individual Morality

To take another example, the present state of public affairs shows clearly enough that the State is the poorest instrument imaginable for improving human society, and that confidence in political institutions and nostrums is ludicrously misplaced. Social philosophers in every age have been strenuously insisting that all this sort of fatuity is simply putting the cart before the horse; that society cannot be moralized and improved unless and until the individual is moralized and improved. Jesus insisted on this; it is the fundamental principle of Christian social philosophy. Pagan sages, ancient sages, modern sages, a whole apostolic succession running all the way from Confucius and Epicetus down to Nietzche, Ibsen, William Penn, and Herbert Spencer – all of these have insisted on it.
-Albert Jay Nock, via Jonah Goldberg

The State

The State has no money. It produces nothing. Its existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say by forced levies on the production of others…What such schemes (as Social Security) actually come to is that the workman pays his own share outright; he pays the employer’s share in the enhanced price of commodities; and he pays the government’s share in taxation. He pays the whole bill; and when one counts in the unconscionably swollen costs of bureaucratic brokerage ones sees that what the workman-beneficiary gets out of the arrangement is about the most expensive form of insurance that could be devised consistently with keeping its promoters out of jail.
-Albert Jay Nock, via Jonah Goldberg

Win

Wars don’t end until someone wins.
-Andrew McCarthy

Battle

Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.
-Andrew McCarthy

Too Difficult

Christianity has not been tried and found false — it’s been tried and found too difficult.
-C.S. Lewis

Manners

Vivian: I don't like your manners.

Marlowe: And I'm not crazy about yours. I didn't ask to see you. I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings. I don't mind your ritzing me drinking your lunch out of a bottle. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.