RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/29/jonah-goldberg-and

My friend Jonah Goldberg has prompted me to think a bit about the issue of character as it relates to public service. Jonah thinks that Donald Trump is a man of bad character. He’s written this several times, most recently, I believe, at National Review where he puts it negatively: it is an “obvious truth,” he says, that “President Trump is not a man of good character.”

In August, on Twitter, Jonah issued a challenge that, he noted, he had been pressing for three years: “Please come up with a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”

I’ll take a crack at that in a moment. First, I want to agree, at least provisionally, with Jonah’s observation in his column that “Character is one of those topics, like culture or morality, that everyone strongly supports yet also argues about.” I say “provisionally” because although I agree that character, culture, and morality are typically matters that interest us deeply and, hence, are things that we endlessly discuss and often argue about, I am not quite sure what he means when he says that “everyone strongly supports” them. Thinking it over, I am not sure I have ever heard anyone say “I support character.” Have you?

Jonah is fond of quoting Heraclitus’s aphorism ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων against the president. He says that it is “most often” translated as “man’s character is his fate.” It has indeed been translated thus, but it is perhaps more accurately translated as “Man’s character is his daimon.” The usual Greek word for fate is μοῖρα. “Daimon,” which was that inner admonitory voice that Socrates said guided him, is something else.

While I am at it, I should perhaps also say I am not sure that ēthos means quite what Jonah’s weaponization of the aphorism implies. As I understand it, ēthos means one’s settled disposition; the Liddell and Scott lexicon mentions the Latin word ingenium among its definitions. Someone in the early modern era might have described it as a man’s “humor.” Jonah begins his most recent column by noting

For a very long time now, I have been predicting that the Trump presidency will end poorly because character is destiny.

The logic is: Trump’s character is bad. Character is destiny. Ergo Trump’s administration will come a cropper. The aphorism by Heraclitus is offered as confirmation of this syllogism.

It is, I’ll admit, amusing to speculate about what Heraclitus would have made of Donald Trump. But for my money, a more pertinent saying of the old Ephesian is φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ: the true nature of things likes to conceal itself.

In any event, Jonah goes on to say, notwithstanding the “obvious truth” that Donald Trump is “not a man of good character,” some people disagree and, mirabile dictu, “seem to have convinced themselves that Trump is a man of good character.” Some of these people, moreover, “take personal offense at the insult, even though I usually offer it as little more than an observation.” The contention that Trump is “not a man of good character,” you see, although it is “an insult,” is also an “obvious truth.” Which is to say, like the proposition “All men are mortal,” one is not free to disagree with it. You might dislike it. You might wish it were not true. But there is something coercive about “an obvious truth.” It is simply beyond debate.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/george_washingtons_prescient_words.html

As the man who was “first in the hearts of his countrymen,” George Washington wrote guiding principles for the newly established country in his Farewell Address of 1796. He stressed:

… that the ‘national Union’ formed the bedrock of ‘collective and individual happiness’ for U.S. citizens. As he explained, ‘The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local distinctions.’

We see the degradation of this idea of patriotism as the left continually hammers away that America is the nexus of evil. One need only read the 1994 book titled Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, which states in its introduction that the “nostalgic vision of a simple, harmonious past … obscures the long history of oppression within the United States.” The editors choose “not to be all inclusive [or] create a pluralistic play of voices.” Instead, they choose “poems that directly address the instability of American identity and confront the prevalence of cultural conflict and exchange within the United States … [in order] to highlight the constant erecting, blurring, breaking, clarifying, and crossing of boundaries that are a consequence of the complex intersections among people’s cultures, and languages within national borders.”

Hail to the fact that the country is not afraid to deal with its past, but woe to the students who receive such a skewed and narrow interpretation of what the country has accomplished.

Dinesh D’Souza writes in his Death of a Nation that “in other countries, a flag is just a flag, but in America … the flag is the symbol of a founding event, emerging out of the Revolutionary War that articulated principles that could only be fully expressed almost ninety years later in the aftermath of one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.” America is “a product of design that gave rise to an American dream[.] … There is no such thing as a French dream, an Indian dream, a Chinese dream. Identity in other countries is based on birth and blood; but in America it is based on embracing American ideals and the American way of life. That’s why the American tribe is so multiracial and includes white people, black people and brown people.”

https://jamieglazov.com/2018/12/27/glazov-gang-ex-intel-

This new Glazov Gang features John Guandolo, an ex-FBI agent and president of Understanding the Threat, and Brad Johnson, a former CIA Station Chief and president of Americans for Intelligence Reform.

John and Brad unveil Who Obama Really Is, and they shed disturbing light on When Marxism and Narcissism Spawn Criminality and Destruction.

Don’t miss it!