Metrosexual Masquerade

I’ve always had trouble with the “turn the other cheek” thing. If someone punched you in the face and you just stood there, you could expect it to happen again and again until you moved away. That’s how it was in my neighborhood. What you did was hit back harder and more often —  twice at least — before asking, “Want some more?” If the other guy was tougher you still had to hit back, even when you knew you’d get pounded. Everyone understood that. There was never a shortage of bullies, and that’s the way you dealt with them. Though I’ve met bullies several times since, I haven’t had to hit one for decades. I think it was because they knew, viscerally, that I would. I’m fairly old now, but I still would.

There are always bullies, and boys who fight back. The way adults handle it, however, has changed. Teachers and administrators who have to deal with occasional fights have stopped inquiring about who or what started it — who may have been in the right, and who in the wrong. Instead, the same punishment is meted out to both combatants because the new ethic is: “Fighting is always wrong.” That sometimes it’s right is never considered in what some call our new, feminized culture. 

I know men who believe that’s the way is should be, and they may be in the majority now. That’s sad, but what’s even worse? These metrosexual men are running our government. When Vladimir Putin invaded the Crimea, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.”

Really John? I know you grew up in Massachusetts the same time I did, but maybe it was in a different kind of neighborhood, or maybe you were a cheek-turner. If you’ve never been punched you in the head, you never learned the basic lessons every man should learn. Clearly Putin learned them, and he understands you much better than you understand him. That’s unfortunate for the rest of us Americans you’re representing. You should know the nature of man is the same in the 21st century as it was in the 19th and in every other century, but you don’t.

After Putin took Crimea and then massed troops on the Ukrainian border, President Obama said almost the same thing Kerry did: “Because you're bigger and stronger [you’re] taking a piece of the country — that is not how international law and international norms are observed in the 21st century.” Oh yeah? I have news for you President Obama: That’s the law of the jungle no matter what century it is. You clearly haven’t learned it, and neither has your Secretary of State.

Yes, I know Kerry got three Purple Hearts and a silver star in Vietnam, but the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth were right when they claimed he lied to receive them. I came to know Kerry shortly after that. I worked in his unsuccessful campaign for congress in 1972. He was a guest in my house and in my parents’ house, and I sensed in him what Putin sensed, and what Iranian negotiators sensed: A leader needs an inner core of toughness and Kerry hasn’t got it. It’s not there. Neither his Boston Brahmin accent nor his $400 haircuts, nor his ill-gotten medals can disguise the emptiness of his expensive, tailored suit. I stopped showing up at his campaign headquarters back in September of ’72, and I was happy to watch him lose in November after spending more than any other congressional candidate in the country.

Never have I met President Obama, but I’ve been forced to see him over and over on television — so many times that I feel like I know him. He’s faced tough situations and I’ve observed his reactions. My conclusion? He hasn’t got it either. If I had any doubt, it was gone when he drew a red line in Syria and then let Assad cross it. He dithered and denied, saying he never drew it in the first place. After that, nothing mattered — not the crease in his pants that David Brooks so admired, not the thrill Chris Matthews got up his leg, not the resolve he pretends to possess as he reads from a teleprompter — none of it. Both our allies and our enemies know that, although people in the Obama Administration still talk tough, that’s all there will ever be. They’ve seen the man behind the curtain and he isn’t much.

Is He Trying To Bring Us Down?

Is he doing it on purpose? As often as the thought entered my mind, I’d push it out. It didn’t seem plausible. If I told people they’d think me crazy, but the thought kept coming back: “Is President Obama trying to destroy the United States?” Is he a kind of Manchurian Candidate? That book’s main character, an American POW, was brainwashed by Chinese communists in Manchuria to reenter the US and assassinate a presidential candidate — thus enabling his running mate to take over as a dictator in the ensuing chaos. It was twice adapted to film and I watched both, but they were too far-fetched.

I’m not alone. In February, former New York City Mayor and GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani said, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” and set off a prolonged media firestorm. Progressives were outrageously outraged for days, and what Giuliani said was relatively mild compared to what I was thinking. Not loving our country might cause him to be unmotivated, but that’s not as bad as purposely destroying it.

A week later, conservative columnist and New Hampshire resident Mark Steyn wrote:  “If [Obama] were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?” That’s been resonating in my brain ever since. Obama’s policies, have been ruinous. He’s nearly doubled our national debt to almost $18 trillion, and what do we have to show for it? He was going to rebuild our infrastructure with shovel-ready projects, but where are they? Hoover built a dam that still works. Roosevelt’s CCCs built the road through Evan’s Notch and the Kancamagus Highway here in Maine and New Hampshire, and many similar projects around the country. Yet after spending thousands of times more money than both those presidents put together, what can Obama point to? Nothing, and the economy still hasn’t recovered in the seventh year of his presidency.

He took over our health care system — one-sixth of our economy — and how’s that going? It’s a disaster. He took over the internet without any action by Congress. In violation of the Constitution, he issued executive amnesty to five million illegal aliens who were already bankrupting hospitals, schools, and welfare programs across the country. Now they’re eligible for Social Security — which is going bankrupt already without millions more drawing checks. He’s using the EPA to destroy the coal industry in the name of human-caused “Climate Change” — the biggest pseudo-scientific fraud of the century. Next he’ll take over the entire energy industry if he’s allowed, and our emasculated Republican congressional “leaders” do nothing to stop him.

It’s even worse overseas. Obama’s Middle East and North Africa policies are, in the words of his own former Middle East Ambassador James Jeffrey: “in a g*******d free fall.” Iran, the world’s biggest sponsor of international terrorism, orchestrated a million to chant “Death to America!” in its own capital, then gained control of four other capitals in the region including Sanaa, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. Meanwhile, Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry is, in the words of our strongest ally in the region: “paving the way for [Iran’s atomic] bomb.” How’s Libya after his “leading from behind”? It’s a basket case. Yemen, which six months ago he called a success story, has collapsed. US forces beat a hasty retreat, leaving weapons and intelligence documents behind. Kerry’s State Department advised US citizens stuck in Yemen to “call India” for help getting out. At a briefing, one reporter asked State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf: “…then you alerted them to opportunities to leave the country?” “Correct,” she responded. “What are those opportunities now? Swim?”

Interviewed last week on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, former Vice President Dick Cheney said: “If you had somebody who, as president — who wanted to take America down. Who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world, reduce our capacity to influence events. Turn our back on our allies and encourage our enemies, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama is doing.”

Yeah, okay, but has Obama been brainwashed? Let’s see: His father was a Muslim. His stepfather was a Muslim. He went to a Muslim school. Though much was sanitized and repressed, evidence exists of his mother, grandmother and grandfather at least leaning communist. The mentor his grandfather found for him, Frank Marshal Davis, was a communist. His political mentor in Chicago was Marxist domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. His pastor for twenty years, the Reverend White, chanted: “No-no-no! Not God bless America! God damn America! It’s in the bible!” Obama called himself a “community organizer” — an occupation created by Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky whose playbook to bring down the country Obama is following.

Yes, the thought keeps coming back, but lately I don’t push it out so quickly.

Multicultural Follies

“Nothing to do with Islam.”

That’s what our political leaders keep telling us when radical Muslims enslave, rape, crucify, behead, and otherwise slaughter people by the thousands all over the world. It has nothing to do with Islam.

Teaching in public school a few years ago, I showed students pictures of burning cars in France. French media said it was exuberant “youths” torching the cars — well over a thousand vehicles in one night. NBC News also called them “youths.” French and American media both averted their eyes from the plain truth that youths burning cars all over France were Muslim.

Reuters said only 1137 cars were burned on New Year’s Eve in 2009, while 1147 had been torched the year before. Responding to what it called, “another wave of reader complaints that we don’t brand these arsonists as Muslims,” Reuters explained: “Sure, there were Muslims among them — but there were non-Muslims as well. What value do we add to a news story by using a questionable religious label to describe a political and socio-economic phenomenon?” Nothing to do with Islam. The arsonists were victims of western capitalist greed, they suggest.

When my students asked why media refused to call the “youths” Muslims, I told them it went against their cherished concept of “Multiculturalism.” They looked at me with blank faces, having no idea what multiculturalism was. I told them to look it up on their laptops.

Some recited the Wikipedia definition, which said: “Multiculturalism refers to the historical evolution of cultural diversity within a jurisdiction, incarnated by its selection policies and institutionalized by its settlement policies.”

“Okay now?” I said. That should clear it up.” Some laughed. Most remained confused.

“Countries in Europe have formed into something called the ‘European Union,’” I explained, “kind of a United States of Europe. Elite EU leaders made ‘multiculturalism’ one of their founding principles, and it basically means that all cultures are equal. No culture or religion is any better or any worse than any other. They’re all the same.”

Then I explained how Muslim imams were like priests of Islam, and when many encouraged Muslims in the mosques to kill the rest of us, that made it hard for European leaders to continue insisting that Islam was no worse than any other religion. So what do European leaders do in the face of Muslim violence? “They pretend it isn’t happening, that’s what. Don’t call the arsonists Muslims. They’re just ‘youths’ getting a little rambunctious.”

More than forty thousand cars are torched in France every year. Nothing to do with Islam, though.

Then I showed them media accounts of how radical Muslim US Army Colonel Nidal Hasan shot forty-three American soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I told them Obama Administration officials insisted the shootings had nothing to do with Islam. The president said: “Well, look, we -- we have seen, in the past, rampages of this sort. And in a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable.”

I told them how the Pentagon investigated and published an 86-page report that never mentioned jihad, Muslim, Islam, or Koran. My students knew what all those words meant. Ultimately Obama’s Department of Homeland Security explained the Fort Hood shooting as “Workplace violence.”

Nothing to do with Islam.

Muslims believe Mohammed was “The Prophet” of Islam and the “Hadith” is an ancient record of Mohammed’s sayings, secondary only to the Koran. The Hadith prohibits making images of Mohammed. Radical Muslims kill people who draw cartoons of Mohammed, but President Obama and socialist French President Hollande insist those killings have nothing to do with Islam.

When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) murders thousands of Iraqis and Syrians in the name of Islam, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, and Attorney General Eric Holder maintain it has nothing to do with Islam. When Islamic terrorists from al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and al Shebaab torture and murder thousands of people across Africa and the Middle East in the name of Islam, our leaders assert it has nothing to do with Islam.

When the Koran, the holy book of Islam, instructs Muslims: “…cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them,” it has nothing to do with Islam. So what if there are over 100 sections of the Koran encouraging followers to commit violence against non-believers? If our leaders are right, we must conclude that the Koran has nothing to do with Islam.

Get it? The teachings of Mohammed — the Prophet of Islam, the teachings in the Koran — the holy book of Islam, the teachings of imams in the mosques of Islam, and the actions of millions of Muslims around the world — have nothing to do with Islam.

Islam is a religion of peace. If not, multiculturalism would be seen as a fraud, and we can’t have that.

American Shrinkage

America is in decline economically, militarily, culturally, morally, educationally - choose your area. Guess I could include athletically as well given that, at this writing, we’re number 7 in gold medals at the Winter Olympics so far, but that’s not so important. Economists expect China to pass us in a couple of years. Generals at the Pentagon worry that we may become unable to defend our Pacific allies against China if present trends continue. The cultural, moral and educational pieces are the causes of the economic piece, some would argue, and I’d tend to agree. But then I’m a former history teacher and familiar with what happened to the Roman Empire.

New Hampshire’s Mark Steyn wrote a couple of books about America’s decline. One, “America Alone,” was a warning. The second, “After America,” you could call a post-mortem preview because Steyn isn’t optimistic that our decline can be reversed. I am. I’m not saying a renaissance is around the corner but it’s possible.

Think about how it is with people in decline. I’m not talking about aging, here. I’m talking about becoming stuck in a negative pattern, a moral slide. The seven deadly sins have brought many individuals to ruin but can they bring down a whole society? We’re watching it all around us aren’t we? What makes men and women decide to do the work necessary to turn their lives around? Pain, usually. They look at themselves and don’t like what they see. They don’t like what they’re becoming and they decide to do something. It’s not easy though. We all know that at some level and most of us choose not to do the necessary work. Some try for a little while and give up. Others persist. They do a one-eighty. They completely change course.

Will America? Not without suffering. What form will it take? Hard to say. Some say the stock bubble fed by all that money-printing will burst, wiping out trillions in wealth, including pension funds. Some say inflation will follow with higher interest rates. As government bonds turn over to finance our $18 trillion debt, high interest payments will crowd out other items the federal budget. Entitlements will have to be cut drastically. How will that affect that large percentage of Americans who have become dependent on big government? Will they passively accept cuts? Not likely. Will pain take the form of massive civil unrest? Many Americans expect it to and have prepared to ride it out. Whatever kind of painful reckoning our burgeoning federal government brings down on us, my hope is that a new majority of Americans will seek a return to small government and strict adherence to our constitution after suffering through it.

Maybe our pain will arrive as a foreign policy crisis. Little good will result as long as President Obama and his chief dopelimat John Kerry continue to appease our enemies, abandon our allies, and diminish America’s influence worldwide. The stage is being set for serious shenanigans that could flare up most anywhere because we’re not being taken seriously anymore.  Last week alone, Iran sent warships to our Atlantic coast to send “a message” while our “ally”- Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai freed sixty-five Taliban prisoners who killed Americans!

More dopelimat than diplomat

Steyn makes the case in “After America” that the British Empire’s decline was genteel with the USA coming right in behind them before a power vacuum could form. England, for example, had been powerful enough that it could provide somewhat credible enforcement of its edict outlawing the slave trade in 1807. The trade continued, but it was diminished when slavers had to constantly look over their shoulders for a British warship on the horizon. Up until lately, leaders of rogue countries like Iran and North Korea worried about how America would react to their shenanigans. Now? Not so much. What will follow America? In his book “After America,” Steyn claims it’s basically “After us, the deluge.”

Who will police the world’s oceans? We see what’s been happening off the Horn of Africa after Somalia fell apart. It’s not unlike what Mediterranean shipping experienced under the Barbary Pirates during America’s infancy. That situation spurred President John Adams to build our first navy. Will piracy spread to other oceans and seas as the US Navy shrinks? Who in the world will fill America’s shoes as we pull back? Nobody else is capable.

Malignant regional powers will likely emerge. A Russian-allied, nuclear Iran will be the dominant player in the Middle East. Nuclear North Korea will be China’s pit bull in east Asia. Will Japan will re-arm itself? Will South Korea? Maybe Saudi Arabia will buy some nukes from Pakistan and think about a navy. Israel will do what it must against its existential threat from Iran and it won’t consult us anymore.

Kerry And My Sister

Most readers know me only as a conservative and are surprised to learn that I haven’t always been one. Seeing and hearing John Kerry several times a day is an almost-constant reminder that I used to think quite differently when I worked for him back in 1972. I was more liberal then and Kerry was staging an unsuccessful run for congress in the fifth district of Massachusetts. Prior to that, he had been involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and I had been fighting city hall in Lowell, the district’s biggest city. His campaign people contacted me and I went to work for them. Some friends and relatives came into the campaign as well, including two of my sisters, Jane and Elaine. When my daughter, Annie, got married last August, they came up for the wedding and we reminisced about those days.

After Kerry lost the election, I had no more contact with him. I had sensed a lack of passion in him and had come to see him as an empty suit. But Elaine and Jane had become friendly with Kerry’s first wife, Julia, and their association with Kerry went on for a few years. Both got to know his family fairly well when they baby-sat his daughters. Elaine watched them sometimes at the three-unit apartment house we had purchased together and they played with my daughters there. Jane was younger and still lived with our parents in nearby Tewksbury. In the summer, she would sometimes accompany the Kerrys to Naushon Island, the private, seven-mile-long summer retreat of the Forbes family and help with the children.

My family has always been politically active. We were born Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrats and politics is innate. During the 1960s and ‘70s, though, the Democrat Party veered left while the McLaughlin family veered right. Not one of the nine of us still living belongs to the party any more, and I’m sure even my father would have resigned if he had lived to see what’s happened to that once-venerable party.

The day after the wedding last August, we were all sipping wine and talking politics on the porch of my mother’s house in Lovell when Jane told a Kerry story I hadn’t heard before. We had been taking turns relating just when it was that each of us had come to dislike the man the Democrats have since nominated for president. Jane described how she was spending a week on Naushon. Unaware that she was on a nearby porch and within earshot, Kerry was telling Julia that he didn’t want Jane to eat dinner with the family that evening. When Julia asked why, Kerry explained that some dinner guests he had invited didn’t approve of the help eating with the family.

As Jane was telling the story thirty years later, she was still angry and it showed clearly on her face. She’s fully as much of a spitfire now as she was at fifteen when the incident occurred, and it had been years since I’d seen that I angry look only she can display. She has a way of pursing her lips and knitting her brow when she’s mad that is unique to her and I had to laugh. “It wasn’t funny,” she said - again with the angry expression. “I was mortified.”

“So what happened?” I asked, trying to be serious. Jane went on to explain that Julia had put her foot down and told her husband she refused to explain that Kerry wanted her to eat in another room. With that, our would-be president backed off and Jane ate with the family as she usually did. I could picture her sitting at the dinner table, looking at Kerry and doing the slow burn as only Jane can.

“John Kerry - courageous man of the people,” I said.

“That’s when I came to hate him,” said Jane.

“Understandable,” I answered.

Eventually, the Kerrys sold their house in Lowell when he went to law school at Boston College. Then he served as Assistant District Attorney in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. I finished school and moved north to the mountains to teach. Elaine and Jane married and moved to the suburbs. Kerry then ran for Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis, then US Senator. Reading snippets of what he was up to in the Boston papers, I was gradually moving from left to right on the political spectrum. Kerry, obviously, remains on the left - the most liberal member of the Senate. Seeing and hearing him every day is a continuous affirmation that I moved in the right direction.

Published October, 2004

Kerry And Me

When I was young and foolish and liberal, I worked for John Kerry. His congressional campaign contacted me back in 1972, but my friends advised me to avoid him because he wasn’t liberal enough. Imagine that. I had been working on a monthly community newspaper called “The Communicator” with a small group of leftists who were protégés of Noam Chomsky. One was a “red diaper baby” - descended from Russian Jewish immigrant parents who were Communists.

Kerry’s campaign thought I controlled hundreds of votes in the section of Lowell, Massachusetts where I lived. I had worked with the Portuguese community there to stop the extension of the Lowell Connector, which would have gone through my house and hundreds of others. After an intense, five-week campaign, the highway was defeated by a close vote of the city council. Coincidentally, Paul Tsongas was on the council at the time and had voted against us. It all went down a month before the Democratic primary and John Kerry was facing stiff opposition. Everyone believed that whoever won the primary would easily defeat the Republican in November. Because I had a leadership role in the movement to defeat the highway, Kerry thought I could help him win. After speaking to his brother Cameron and others, I agreed, mostly because of his strong stand against the war in Vietnam. I learned a lot - enough to make me realize how distasteful modern, large-scale, electoral campaigns are. Kerry spent more money that year than any other congressional campaign in the country. Still, he lost. By the November election, I was tired of both electoral politics and of John Kerry. I didn’t like the politics of the Nixon Republican who beat him, but I liked John Kerry the person even less. I was glad he lost.

I liked a lot of the people who worked for Kerry then, but I didn’t take to him. I had no sense of what he was inside; all I could perceive there was a vacancy. There was plenty of ambition and a lot of posturing, but little else. Others saw him as a polished speaker and war hero. He reminded them of JFK - Caroline Kennedy worked on the campaign as well as several celebrities of the time. I met Peter Yarrow, Kurt Vonnegut, George Plimpton, and others. Many believed he would someday be president. Though I never heard him say it, I think that was Kerry’s intention even way back then. I had the sense that every decision he made was with that ambition in mind.

Kerry had filed nomination papers in several congressional districts that year. Only when incumbent Republican Brad Morse was appointed to a UN position by President Nixon did he decide to run in the fifth district where I lived. Clearly, he wanted to run for congress, and it didn’t matter where because it was all about him and not the people he would represent.

Now that he’s the frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination, I’m seeing a lot of him again. He’s older, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much. His positions on the big issues facing us, however, change often He voted for the war, but he voted against the money to pay for it and now claims the war is wrong. He voted for NAFTA, but now he’s against it. He voted against the federal Defense of Marriage Act because he didn’t want homosexual marriage to be outlawed, but now he’s against homosexual marriage. He voted against drilling ANWR, but now he supports building an oil pipeline to it. There are many other examples too numerous to list.

Kerry came to prominence as the head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Members, including Kerry, publicly threw their medals back at the government that awarded them. Much later, I learned that Kerry didn’t actually throw his medals back. He secretly kept them and threw somebody else’s medals instead. He wanted to seem like he was throwing his medals back without actually doing it - vintage Kerry.

After losing his congressional race in 1972, Kerry went to law school at Boston College. That was smart, because BC was considered the Irish Harvard and, in Massachusetts, it was helpful politically to cultivate one’s Irishness. After passing the bar, Kerry went to work in the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office as Assistant DA. From there, he became Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis and then US Senator. Somewhere along the way, he dropped wealthy heiress wife number one and picked up wealthy heiress wife number two.

With a name like Kerry, everyone assumed he was Irish, but surprise! Kerry isn’t Irish at all, it turns out. His ancestors came from eastern Europe somewhere and assumed the name Kerry. His other ancestors are Yankee Brahmins the Irish perceived as enemies. Kerry couldn’t mimic JFK unless people believed he was Irish, so that’s the impression he cultivated. As presidential candidate, he’s merged war hero and anti-war hero - brandishing the medals he pretended to throw back and criticizing the war he voted for.

I’m not so young anymore. I’m a little bit less foolish and a lot less liberal. Kerry looks older too in spite of the botox treatments, but although he changes all the time, he hasn’t really changed much at all.

Published March, 2004