A great article on the west’s attitude about fighting terrorists for the last 30 years appears today on NRO, here.

It sparked a thought- why can Liberals darkly mutter about the high proportion of Jews contributing to the foreign policy of this administration, but any mention of the high proportion of Arab Muslims contributing to terrorist activity is deemed racist?

I guess I know the answer to that already.

Last Sunday’s sermon is posted. It’s on the martyrdom of Stephen, and the power of faith that he displayed. It’s under the ‘Sermons’ link on the sidebar.

It is really important to maintain friendships, I think. And I’m not very good at it.

When I was just a little lad, friendship was very difficult for me. I was an odd child, I’ve been told. Of course, I thought it was everyone else who was weird, at the time. But as I grew older, I discoverd it was I who had difficulty grasping the social norms and niceties. I got better at it, but more importantly, I came to accept who I was and who everyone else was, to a greater degree, and this made life easier.

Friendships now came fast and furious. In school, at work, in church, I knew everyone and everyone knew me. I’d sling the humor and the wackiness and the love, and it wasn’t long before I knew a lot of people everywhere I went. I’d bump into people in town, at the mall, at the bar, that I knew from somewhere. It’s actually kind of a street cred when people know you better than you know them. That’s right, I’m kind of a poor-man’s celebrity! Say hi, give the wave, move on. You’ll never run out of friends.

But then life got to be more work. You grow up a little more, change jobs, move, have a baby, and suddenly you realize that the guy you were such good friends with but always assumed was replaceable, turns out not to be as replaceable as you thought. Turns out you’re not the only special individual in the world- they’re all special individuals, and every friend you lose touch with is one particular kind of person that you’ll never meet again, and that you’ll miss.

So you learn to work at it. You learn to go out of your way (and where I live, that usually means an hour out of my way) to see people, to call people, to write an email. A guy who was a close friend before, that I worked with, that I had lunch with practically every day- now I’m lucky to have a beer with him twice a year. But it’s something.

—

There was a guy I went to school with at Case Western, a guy named Greg Smith. I put that in here in case he reads this. Greg, if you read this, drop me a line. Hopefully you’ve learned to use the Internet by now. You were terrible at it when I knew you, but that was 1993 after all. They didn’t even have blogs then, not really.

Anyway, Greg Smith was one of those real individuals. He was smart, he was hard-working, he was funny, he was a great musician and he was considering a triple-major in classic literature and ancient Greek and something else equally arcane, if I remember correctly. He was from someplace in Ohio like Akron and one of the best nights in my life was hanging out with him talking about theology on the tailgate of his Vista Cruiser and smoking awful 30-year old cigars that a professor gave me. Greg was also a lot better Christian than me, although I didn’t know it for a long time.

I transferred to a different school the next year, and just figured I’d meet lots of other people like Greg, so why bother keeping in touch? I think he even wrote me a letter, which I can’t remember whether I replied to or just lost. I was kind of a, well, something that might get this page locked out of a few filters if I told you, back then. I suppose it goes without saying that I never met anyone like Greg. I’ve taken a few stabs at locating him since then, without success. If only he had a name like Javier DeLonghi or something, it might be easier. But one of the most unusual people I’ve ever known had one of the most common names there is. Irony, I think, is the proper term for that.

—

Maintain friendships. It’s worth it.

Yes, it’s true- they want us gone from Iraq. But the question is, who’s “they”?

For the answer, check out ASV today, here.

I’ve posted a new sermon, from Acts 7. In it, I discuss how the temple was never intended to be the center of Jewish worship, but pointed to the promises of God, which were the center. An excerpt:

The Temple was the place where the people of Israel went to meet God. The pillar of fire and cloud that led them through the wilderness, symbolizing God’s presence, always rested where the tabernacle was supposed to go. It was in the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, where God’s presence was most symbolically seen, where God made His presence known to the people. Later the Holy of Holies was seated in the Temple, when the Temple replaced the Tabernacle. It represented fellowship with God.

But it also represented man’s alienation from God, at the very same time. Fellowship with God was barred. The Holy of Holies was barred to the people. Only the High Priest could enter it, and then only once a year, and then only with blood sacrifice. The Temple, while being a promise of fellowship, was ultimately a constant reminder that they did not have fellowship because of their sins.

But the promises of God pointed to a time when that would change. The promises spoke of a new covenant, when God would have mercy on them and forget their sins, and then He would be their God and they would be His people. The prophets spoke of one who would come and clear the way to fellowship with God, who would make the crooked roads straight, and lay low the mountains and raise the valleys, who would make plain the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.

And when Jesus came, and died on the cross to pay the price for our sins, He did exactly that. And the heavy curtain in the temple that separated the Holy of Holies ripped in two, showing that man was no longer barred from fellowship with God. In Jesus Christ, every believer could approach God directly. Jesus was the way that man could truly know God. Jesus was, and is, the true Temple.

Of course, when the veil ripped in two, it showed something else. The Ark, and the mercy seat, and all the other furniture of the Temple, had long ago been carried off by the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the rest. The Temple worship had been destroyed by God because of the idolatry of the people of Israel. The Temple had become a monument of the failure of man to save himself, to be able to approach God truly through ceremonies and ritual. The Temple had become a constant reminder to Israel of their need for a redeemer, a high priest who would forever clear the obstacles between God and man. Jesus was and is that redeemer, but because they had refused to see the true message of the Temple worship, they didn’t recognize Jesus when He came.

We are all at the same risk, when we elevate ‘church’ above Jesus; the body above the head; the size of the congregation above the content of the service; the means above the end. Jesus did not come and die for us to have the opportunity to have potluck dinners or women’s retreats or long committee meetings about the building fund. He came so we could have fellowship with God.

The link’s on the sidebar, under ‘Sermons’.

I hope this isn’t becoming a BabyBlog or anything…

Katie came in to the front room today while I was getting ready to go out, and said, “you suck!”

whuu..

What?

She repeated, “You suck!” and pointed right at me.

That’s it, we’re throwing out the TV. Wait, we don’t get any TV. Just DVDs, and she sure didn’t hear that on Looney Tunes or Veggie Tales.

What did you say, Katie? “You Suck!” Andrea, standing in the kitchen doorway, incredulous.

Wait, sock! I’m holding my socks to go out. “Your socks!” Yes, Katie. They’re my socks.

Whew. A few more weeks of innocence.

Real leadership means having the vision to see things nobody else thinks are possible.

Don’t listen to your critics.

You don’t have to know everything to be a great leader. Just know who does know.

It can actually be an asset to have people think you’re dumb and lazy.

If you want to change the world for the better, you have to believe in people.

R.I.P.

A great post from The Belmont Club pointed me to the book The Road to Wigan Pier, a book by George Orwell about the very hard lives of coal miners in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, early in the 20th century.

Orwell was a socialist, and was almost as critical of capitalism as he was of totalitarianism in 1984. Wigan Pier purports to show the failures of capitalism and industrialism, in the heavy price it exacts on people’s lives. This passage is perhaps somewhat emblematic, from chapter 1:

But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are

just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens

and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products

of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the

civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what

industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first

steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under

the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth

century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led

–to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people

creeping round and round them like blackbeetles.

I’d certainly agree that conditions sounded quite horrible during that period for lots of people. But it seems a bit of a failure on a couple of fronts, both in regard to the past and to the future.

With regard to the past, the lives of a large portion of earth’s population have always been horrible. People tend to look on the sufferings of their day as some kind of anomaly, and indeed they frequently are, in the details. The miners of this novel suffer from breathing coal dust; suffer from having to walk large distances in a crouch; suffer from working in an unsafe environment far underground. These things were relatively new labor conditions in the Industrial era, and thus make a poignant novel. But in the broader scope, the real problem the miners faced was poverty (not new), dangerous work (not new), fraudulent employers, miserable living conditions, and few options for anything different in their lives or those of their children (all not new). Farming peasants in the middle ages; hunter-gatherers in tribes on the North American continent; fishermen; sailors; conscript soldiers- you get the point. The majority of mankind has always lived in slavery and always lived in misery.

And with regard to the future, the seeds for the correction of the conditions Orwell described can be seen in his own book. From chapter 2:

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are

now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have

worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that

passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal.

They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now,

if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and

fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of

coal.

He is, of course, exactly right. When the rich and powerful of the world needed to enslave others to get what they want and were able to do so, they did. But as the coalminers got more efficient, and people became more wealthy as a result, it was no longer viable to have women dragging buckets of coal by chains around their waists. It was either unsafe, unprofitable, or unpopular. Unsafe is really just another way of saying unprofitable, because all work is unsafe in an absolute sense. The costs, both financially and socially, of having women do that kind of work in the coal mines eventually outweighed the benefits, or they’d still be doing it today. Nobody forced them to do it then; they did it because it was more profitable than not doing it.

Orwell also talks about the fact that one in three miners of his day had access to baths at the mine heads so they could easily wash themselves after shifts. This had not always been the case, but Orwell fails to examine the causes that would lead the mine operators make this sort of thing available to the men. He says the operating costs of those showers was paid by the miners themselves, but there you have it- they have the option, and pay for it. The mine owners themselves must have set the system up in the first place. Why? Because happy workers are more productive workers. Safe workers are more productive workers. This is something the world knows, and mainly because of capitalism.

OK, you caught me. This is a free market screed. Guys like Orwell can complain about the plight of the worker all they want, but as governments got better at enforcing contracts and workers got more productive as the industrial age advanced, they just got richer and their lives got better. They were able to demand better working conditions, more money and regular work. They were able to demand this because their skills and productivity made them valuable, and owners were willing to pay for that value because it earned them profits. Technological advance made it possible to do more with less workers, and this allowed the workers still doing it to make more. Orwell describes the fact that they used a kind of circular saw to chop at the coal instead of just picks and crowbars, which made them far more efficient. The coal miners who still did the work decades after Orwell wrote were furious when Margaret Thatcher put many of them out of work in 1984 and promoted nuclear power and better efficiency in the coal industry- if the jobs were such miserable slavery, why protest when the world moved past the need for them? They had to switch careers, retrain- yes, there was some short-term discomfort, but a more wealthy advanced society produces more jobs in more variety, and so it’s only short-term discomfort.

But then Orwell’s not really much of an economist. He says things like this, from chapter 10:

Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation–an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He

is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.

Good for him for exposing the hypocrisy of your average left-winger, but bad for him for relying on the false dilemma of Empire or global isolationism. England can have its strawberries and cream without ruling India. Just be smart, be productive, and buy them.

The false dilemmas continue, from ch. 13:

We may take it that the return to a simpler, free, less mechanized way of life, however desirable it may be, is not going to happen. This is not fatalism, it is merely acceptance of facts. It is meaningless to oppose Socialism on the ground that you object to the beehive State, for the beehive State is here. The choice is not, as yet, between a human and an inhuman world. It is simply between Socialism and Fascism, which at its very best is Socialism with the virtues left out.

The industrial society, the advanced modern world, is coupled in his mind with a centralized planning state. The idea that a largely unplanned, and yet very modern and sophisticated society could exist is simply not a possibility that Orwell conceived of. But look around you- we have it. It is telling that in 1984, technology is the enemy of freedom, not its friend. But here I am, a comparative nobody, able to express myself and advance my ideas to anyone who cares to listen, solely because of technological progress. We found out about Tianneman Square and the student riots in Iran because of technology.

Perhaps it was amazing to people living in the dark days of the 30’s to imagine that progress was possible (in fact the only way it was possible) if government just got out of the way. The dichotomy is not between Socialism (state planning with a heart) and Fascism (state planning without a heart). It’s ultimately between all forms of planning (which always end up as Fascism) on the one hand, and freedom of every kind, including economic, on the other. That’s the real dilemma, the real choices societies always swing between.

Economic freedom is necessary to any other kind of freedom. Without freedom over my house and car and checkbook and labor, all my other freedoms ultimately are just on paper. The Soviets found this out the hard way, and China’s about to. If you give people freedom of economic decisions, they’ll take freedom in all their other decisions too. On the other hand, if you deny economic freedom, you can give the people religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, anything else you like. None of it will matter.

Orwell seems like a good guy, struggling with tough choices in dark times. But he ultimately remained stuck in the same class snobbery he tried so hard to escape. The poor miners of Wigan Pier could only be rescued by their betters. But history has proven that if you just give those miners freedom, they’ll save themselves.

A judge in New Jersey has ruled that ‘Ladies Night’ at local nightclubs is discrimination. As the law seems to be operating today, I guess it is. It was only a matter of time, I suppose. We gave our government the right to engineer society according to some arbitrary set of principles a long time ago, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they actually do it.

What about “Curves”, a ladies-only health club? What about women-only colleges? One suspects that they went after the night clubs first because the behavior police can’t stand the idea of anyone having fun.

Now the whole idea of ‘Ladies Night’ is, of course, rather distasteful. The marketing idea is, as I understand it, that if you get lots of ladies in and let them get drunk for free (relatively cheap, as it doesn’t take too much with most ladies), then the guys will take care of themselves. The guys will happily go and pay cover charges and buy lots of overpriced drinks if they know there will be lots of liquored-up women there. A fool and his money are soon partying. Yes, it’s distasteful. But criminal?

I guess we can thank the Christian progressives of the last century for so thoroughly indoctrinating this country with the idea that anything we find morally distasteful should also be illegal. The church is the light of the world, and if that light becomes darkness, it’s a very great darkness.

By now, of course, it’s well established that the media is out to destroy the right wing and shill for the left. This should come as a surprise to no one.

What came as a surprise to me was how long it’s been going on and how far-reaching its effects have been.

I’ve been reading A History of the American People by Paul Johnson, a little bit at a time for a while now. Great book, by the way. Johnson’s opinion of the Watergate affair was that a press, who had eagerly shilled for FDR, JFK and LBJ, but who hated Nixon, destroyed him over minor issues when they had actively covered up much larger transgressions in Nixon’s predecessors. Well, no big shocker there.

The big shocker to me was how their actions led directly to the disaster that was the ’70’s. Nixon had gotten us out of Vietnam, but had not turned tail and run. He had negotiated a settlement that fixed the border between North and South and that included an American air and naval presence offshore, so that America could easily come to the aid of the south if the north broke the truce. Of course the north did break the truce, but by the time they did, Nixon had been forced out and Gerald Ford was president, appointed to the Vice President post in the wake of the different scandal that forced Spiro Agnew out and then succeeding Nixon. Being unelected, he was very weak, and was only allowed through the nominations process by a Democratic congress because he would be weak, having no coalition, no mandate, no strong principled positions. But Ford was a good guy, and tried very hard to get Congress to do something when the Communists invaded the south, but of course they didn’t.

The presidency was neutered for the rest of the decade. Ford could do very little, and Carter was even worse, emboldening our enemies and alienating our friends. All this because the press decided that they didn’t like Nixon, and set out to destroy him.

Now this is all Johnson’s take on it. I know that Johnson’s pretty conservative, so perhaps he’s biased. But the resemblance to our own day, where a press eager to witchhunt Bush for anything they can come up with, when they covered up far greater offenses under Clinton, is a little shocking, and chilling in the consequences if they succeed in getting Kerry elected.