RUTHFULLY YOURS

The progressive mind functions in terms of fossilized paradigms into which every crisis and problem are fitted, no matter how many qualifying or contradictory facts are left behind. These paradigms are part of a worldview, a picture of human existence that gives it coherence and meaning, and a narrative that gives people an identity and a morality. With these paradigms we can sort out the good from the bad, the saved from the damned, the political goals we should pursue, the ones we should avoid––and who gets the power to decide.

Every human community from the most primitive tribe to the most advanced civilization functions in terms of some sort of worldview. For nearly 2000 years Christianity provided the dominant paradigms of Western civilization. Modernity, however, developed a new and dangerous twist on this eternal human behavior. With the rise of the natural sciences, people began to dream of a new paradigm based on science, not the irrational myths and superstitions of religion. Whole new disciplines arose to teach and institutionalize these new “scientific” truths about human identity and behavior. Soon anthropology, psychology, sociology, and political science displaced the old philosophical, traditional, and theological understanding of human life.

Isaiah Berlin describes this historical process and its consequences: “The success of physics seemed to give reason for optimism: once appropriate social laws were discovered, rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation, and men’s wishes, within the limits of the uniformities of nature, could in principle all be made to come true . . . The rational reorganization of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted.” The progressive worldview is easily recognizable in this description. Just let technocrats armed with science and backed by the coercive power of the state take over the organization of society from the myths of religion and the superstitions of tradition, and we will achieve the utopia of prefect freedom, justice, and equality.

This whole notion, of course, is itself a myth, one whose bloody consequences stain every page of modern history with genocides and gulags. Humans are not material things in the world that can be understood by the laws of nature so reliably that people can be organized and controlled like the cogs and wheels in a watch. People are too complex and intricate, too mysterious in their motives, too spontaneous in their actions, and too unpredictable because of their radical freedom to chose. Yet from Freud and Marx down to today’s evolutionary psychologists, this myth of the “human sciences” is marketed as real science, beyond discussion or qualification as much as the laws of gravity or the heliocentric solar system.

He was also a terrible writer in Spanish and English- a bilingual literary hack….like Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Mario Vargas Llosa whose pretentious drivel makes the rounds in book clubs ……rsk

THE AUTHOR:

Armando Valladares (born May 30, 1937) is a Cuban poet, diplomat, and human-rights activist. In 1960, he was arrested by the Cuban government for protesting Communism, leading Amnesty International to name him a prisoner of conscience. Following his release in 1982, he wrote a book, Against All Hope, detailing his imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Cuban government, and was appointed by President Reagan to serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Describing his incarceration at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Valladares wrote:“For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.”

“All dictators and murderers have had staunch defenders — Stalin, Hitler, and Fidel Castro.

Perhaps the most heinous in that fauna supporting dictatorships are writers, poets, and artists. I’ve been saying for decades that an honest intellectual has a commitment to society: Tell the truth, fight for respect and human dignity, and do not lie or skip over the historical reality and thereby abuse the privilege of reaching millions of people.

This is one of the biggest crimes in the case of the late Gabriel García Márquez. He put his pen at the service of Fidel Castro’s tyranny, supporting torture, the concentration camps, and the murdering by firing squad of whoever dared to oppose the Communist regime. Márquez used to say that the only country in the Americas that respected human rights was Cuba.

Many years ago, I helped with the rescue of a lady who was Márquez’s personal secretary in Cuba; she was hiding from the police in Colombia because they wanted to return her to Havana. A city commissioner of Miami, Fla. (he was mayor of Miami at the time), Xavier Suarez, accompanied me to the airport to welcome her.

She told us about the life of the Colombian writer in Cuba. Márquez lived in a “House of Protocol” with Blanquita, his teenage lover – who was young enough to be his granddaughter (we saw the pictures). The Nobel winner had a white Mercedes Benz, another gift from his friend Fidel Castro, and privileges in exchange for defending Castro’s dictatorship, all while he rent his robes denouncing Pinochet.

Slanders and lies may be part of a deliberate strategy to drive up turnout in November.

Harry Reid isn’t backing down from his claim that rancher Cliven Bundy’s supporters are “domestic terrorists.”

It’s astonishing rhetoric given the White House’s characterization of the mass shooting by a genuine terrorist, Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 Americans at the Fort Hood Army base after yelling “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great.) Rather than labeling Hasan’s actions “domestic terrorism,” the Obama administration is prosecuting him for having committed “workplace violence.”

Democratic rhetoric is become ever more desperate and overheated as we approach the November midterm elections. Last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that GOP positions on immigration were motivated by racism. She was followed by Representative Steve Israel, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who said, “To a significant extent, the Republican base does have elements animated by racism.” Even some leftists, such as Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, have rebuked the excess of these attacks. Referring to Democrats’ use of the “equal pay” issue to buttress claims that Republicans are waging “a war on women,” Marcus wrote, “The level of hyperbole — actually of demagoguery — that Democrats have engaged in here is revolting.”

What is going on? Increasingly, journalists who cover the White House are concluding that the smears are part of a conscious strategy to distract voters from Obamacare, the sluggish economy, and foreign-policy reverses; the attacks are intended, the thinking goes, to drive up resentment and hence turnout among the Democratic base.

Golda Meir was Israel’s fourth prime minister, serving from 1969 to 1974, and the world’s third female head of government. In her seventies at the time, she charmed much of the world with her “Jewish grandmother” image—especially as juxtaposed with her defense minister Moshe Dayan, a tough sabra (native-born Israeli) with an eye-patch.

Unlike Dayan, Meir was not a sabra; she was born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1898. Her first memory was of her father boarding up the front door because of rumors of a pogrom. In 1905 her father moved to Milwaukee by himself in search of work; a year later, having found a job in a railroad yard, he brought the rest of the family over.

Golda showed leadership qualities early, forming something called the American Young Sisters Society. She was also drawn to socialist Zionism, then an energetic enterprise devoted to creating pioneering settlements in the Land of Israel. She joined a socialist-Zionist youth movement, and in that context she met Morris Meyerson. They got married in 1917, and in 1921 they left to join the fledgling Jewish community in Palestine. (Golda later Hebraicized the name Meyerson to Meir.)

Golda Meir’s story stirs a certain nostalgia. The current Israeli Labor Party—a descendant of socialist Zionism or, as it came to be called, Labor Zionism—is a pallid, even ludicrous remnant. It hardly has the spunk and grit that Golda Meir embodied. True, the decline of socialism left a void for this ideological trend; but it’s not only that.

Golda and Morris began their lives in Palestine on a kibbutz—a socialist farming community. Golda loved the kibbutz life but Morris hated it, and they moved to Jerusalem. They had two children but ended up separating, though they never divorced.

Meanwhile Meir’s political activism continued, and she rose through the ranks of the Labor Zionist establishment. By the 1930s she was head of the Political Department of the Histadrut—a trade-union behemoth whose power only started to be curtailed in the 1990s. In the 1940s she headed the Political Department of the Jewish Agency—then the governing body of the Jewish community in Palestine.

I’m sure that Cliven Bundy [1] probably could have cut a deal with the Bureau of Land Management and should have. Of course, it’s never wise to let a federal court order hang over your head. And certainly we cannot have a world of Cliven Bundys if a legal system is to function.

In a practical sense, I also know that if I were to burn brush on a no-burn day, or toss an empty pesticide container in the garbage bin, or shoot a coyote too near the road, I would incur the wrath of the government in a way someone does not who dumps a stripped stolen auto (two weeks ago) in my vineyard, or solvents, oil, and glass (a few months ago), or rips out copper wire from the pump for the third time (last year). Living in a Winnebago with a porta-potty and exposed Romex in violation of zoning statutes for many is not quite breaking the law where I live; having a mailbox five inches too high for some others certainly is.

So Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest.

Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert. How strange, then, at this late postmodern date, for someone like Bundy on his horse still to be playing the law-breaking maverick Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) in (the David Miller, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Abbey effort) Lonely Are the Brave.

But the interest in Mr. Bundy’s case is not about legal strategies in revolving fiscal disagreements with the federal government.

Instead, we all have followed Mr. Bundy for three reasons.

One, he called attention to the frightening fact that the federal government owns 83% of the land in Nevada. Note that “federal” and “government” are the key words and yet are abstractions. Rather, a few thousands unelected employees — in the BLM, EPA, Defense Department, and other alphabet soup agencies — can pretty much do what they want on the land they control. And note, this is not quite the case in Silicon Valley or Manhattan or Laguna Beach. The danger can be summed up by a scene I see about once a month on a Fresno freeway: a decrepit truck stopped by the California Highway Patrol for having inadequate tarps on a trailer of green clippings, just as a new city garbage truck speeds by, with wet garbage flying over the median. Who will police the police?

TO THE RECENT spate of 50th-anniversary reflections on key political and cultural milestones — the 1963 March on Washington, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show — here’s one to add: The presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the most influential also-ran in modern American politics.

Goldwater was nicknamed “Mr. Conservative,” but now even liberals adore him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. penned an essay a few years back effusive in its praise for Goldwater, whom he described as an exemplar of civility, decency, and integrity. Goldwater was “neither mean-spirited nor racist,” wrote Kennedy; he challenged the liberals of his time through “sensible argument and honest conviction.” A 2006 documentary produced by CC Goldwater, Barry’s liberal’s granddaughter, is strewn with such liberal tributes; Hillary Clinton, James Carville, and Walter Cronkite are among those who attest to the man’s statesmanship and charm.

How things have changed.

In 1964, Goldwater appalled the political establishment. Though the blunt-spoken Arizonan’s bestseller, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” had made him a hero on the right even before his White House run, liberal commentators seemed shocked to discover that his conservatism was for real. When he declared, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in San Francisco, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” they were aghast.

What followed was one of the most ruthless campaigns of invective in US political history. Goldwater and his conservative supporters were repeatedly likened to Nazis, madmen, and warmongers. Jackie Robinson said he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Lyndon Johnson’s notorious “daisy” commercial showed a little girl picking flower petals, until she is overwhelmed by the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. A month before the election, the cover of Fact magazine blared: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Unfit to be President!”

Kosovo shares one social problem with Saudi Arabia. That is the infiltration of radical Islam. The story of victimized moderate Muslim clerics and intellectuals, removed from their congregations, dismissed from their teaching positions, and physically attacked, remains to be told.

I would like to be a brother or friend to a female president, but to a president that has reached her position as Wadjda got her bicycle — because she deserved it.

Saudi Arabia, a male-dominated country, is changing slowly. One example of its cautious new openness is the 2012 movie Wadjda, Saudi Arabia’s first feature film, by its first female director, Haifaa Al-Mansour.

My country, the Balkan republic of Kosovo, more than 90% Muslim, is likewise male-controlled and also appears to be changing.

That impression, however, is created by Kosovo having a woman president, Atifete Jahjaga, and is false.

President Atifete Jahjaga does not belong in the same category as Wadjda, the female protagonist of the Saudi film. We need a Wadjda for our country – both a female with the spirit of the cinema character, and a movie like it. We need many Wadjdas.

From Dickens we get ‘butterfingers,’ from Lewis Carroll ‘chortle.’ Shakespeare’s word for a half-smile—’smilet’—never caught on.

In 1754, the English dilettante Horace Walpole wrote a letter to his friend Horace Mann in which he mentioned that he had recently found some curious information about heraldry in an old Venetian book. Dangling a talisman over the page, he had been drawn to the detail in question. He described this as a happy accident, “almost of that kind which I call Serendipity” and proceeded to explain to Mann what he meant by this expressive word. His inspiration was a fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the heroes of which were forever making chance discoveries.

The word “serendipity” did not catch on immediately. It became well-known only in the second half of the 20th century, thanks in no small part to its adoption by Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, and the Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton (who may have also coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy”). Today “serendipity”
is one of those mellifluous dainties beloved of poetic souls and posturing journalists, and although Horace Walpole made other bequests to posterity—the Gothic novel “The Castle of Otranto” (1764) and the villa like a slice of wedding cake that he built west of London at Strawberry Hill—the delicious “serendipity” may just be his most cherished achievement.

Coinages of this kind are the subject of Paul Dickson’s “Authorisms.” Mr. Dickson is a prolific writer on words, and his latest book focuses on some of the words that have sprung from the imagination of particular writers. It is a work of reference and gentle entertainment rather than a seamless narrative; most of the entries are less than half a page long. Mr. Dickson omits Cannon and Merton from his discussion of “serendipity” and is on parlous ground when he describes the word as “wonderfully onomatopoeic”—there is little in the sound of it to suggest happy accident. But he has plenty of pleasing things to say about a host of words and phrases, from “a man got to do what he got to do” (attributed to a character in “The Grapes of Wrath”) to the noun “zombification” (apparently coined by NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu ).

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Dickson’s most-cited source is Shakespeare —”one fell swoop,” “to the manner born,” “salad days.” Also on the leaderboard, though a long way behind, are Charles Dickens (“butterfingers,” “scrooge”) and Lewis Carroll (“chortle,” “galumphing”). But determining who actually invented a word is notoriously tricky, and Mr. Dickson occasionally goes astray—though he has the gumption to issue the caveat that some of the coinages he identifies may have been “second strikes.”

He says that Shakespeare coined “eyesore,” yet more than half a century before he used the word in “The Taming of the Shrew” it appeared in a book by the lawyer John Rastell. He also presents Shakespeare as the first user of the rare and attractive noun “smilet” to denote half a smile, though it had previously been employed by the poet Abraham Fraunce, whose writings Shakespeare knew. He writes of Christopher Booker coining “neophiliac” for his 1969 volume about recent changes in English life, but sociologists had been using it since the 1940s. And Theodore Levitt didn’t coin “globalization” in a piece for the Harvard Business Review in 1983; 10 years earlier Fouad Ajami, a foreign-policy expert, was using it in what is now its current sense, and he may not have been the first to do so.

Christians the world over celebrated the resurrection of their savior on Sunday with worship services and family gatherings. Thirty-eight-year-old Sonia Garro shares the faith too, but she spent the holiday in a Cuban dungeon as a prisoner of conscience, just as she has for the past two years.

Ms. Garro is a member of the Christian dissident group Ladies in White, started in Havana in 2003 by sisters, wives and mothers of political prisoners to peacefully protest the unjust incarceration of their loved ones. It has since expanded to other parts of the country and added many recruits. The group’s growing popularity has worried the Castros, and they have responded with increasing brutality.

Cuba’s military government wants us to believe that the Brothers Fidel and Raul Castro are “reforming.” To buy that line you have to pretend that Ms. Garro and her sisters in Christ don’t exist. Of course that’s often the impression one gets from Havana-based reporters working for foreign media outlets.

They’ve been invited into the country not to serve the truth but to serve the dictatorship. Fortunately, there are brave and independent Cuban journalists who continue to tell the Ladies’ story, despite scant resources.

In the late winter of 2012, Cubans were looking forward to a visit from Pope Benedict XVI and the Ladies were lobbying the Vatican for an audience. Their relentless pleading was embarrassing the dictatorship, which had been beating them in the streets on their way to Sunday Mass for almost a decade. It was also making the Church, which had already cut its own deal with the regime on the terms of the visit, look bad. On the weekend of March 17 Castro sent the Ladies a warning by locking up some 70 of their members.

Most of those detained, including leader Berta Soler, had been freed by the time the pontiff touched down in Cuba nine days later, but Ms. Garro was not. Benedict celebrated some Masses, did photo ops with the despots and left.

It was a clever strategy: The world saw the release of the many Ladies, which obscured the continued detention of the one. That one—poor, black and not well known internationally—serves, to this day, as a constant reminder of the wrath Castro will bring down on anyone in the barrios who gets out of line.

Not quite….in congress the majority of the Republican, and about 20 Democrat incumbents are on to this ruse and on to the fig leaf offered by amending a requirement that the government have environmental oversight. This is a big economy and energy issue and will play a large role in November 2014…..rsk

“The Koch brothers may get the media attention, but the billionaire getting the most political bang for his buck is Tom Steyer. The hedge-fund politico has pledged to raise $100 million to help Democrats keep the Senate, and on Friday he received a major return on his investment when the State Department again delayed its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.

State’s excuse is that it wants to wait on the outcome of a legal challenge in Nebraska, but that’s no reason for the federal government not to declare itself. Earlier this year State’s latest environmental review found no net climate harm from the pipeline, which would take oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. State found that the oil sands will be developed even if the Keystone XL isn’t built.

The real reason for the delay is Democratic politics. Mr. Steyer and the party’s liberal financiers are climate-change absolutists who have made killing Keystone a non-negotiable demand. But the White House doesn’t want to reject the pipeline before November because several Senate Democrats running for re-election claim to favor it. We say “claim” because Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and others can’t even get Majority Leader Harry Reid to give them a vote on the floor.

So Senate Democrats get to have it both ways. They can benefit this year from the riches of Mr. Steyer, who pronounced himself well pleased by the delay. But they can also run in support of the XL pipeline and the thousands of new jobs it would create. Then President Obama can formally nix it next year.