Thoughts on the 2016 Election and the Regeneracy of the Fourth Turning

On June 5, 2009, I posted a blog entry here entitled: Of an Ominous Financial Crash, An Ordinary National Election, A Trivial Tea Party. That entry celebrated how I found a book I had been looking for, Strauss and Howe's The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny. I wrote:

As the strange and apparently ominous events of the past half-year have been accruing, I have wanted to re-read The Fourth Turning, but all my rooting in the accessible boxes in the garage came up wanting. So I was anxiously on the lookout for the book as I began the task of making my library as planned in the Chem Geek Princess's old room (now the Guest Room/Library). Thus I was amazed when finally, I found the book and read the page that fell open, and that last, pregnant sentence:

" . . . the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, as trivial as a Tea Party."

The context Strauss and Howe were referring to is the spark that sets off the transition into the Fourth Turning, the Crisis period of our time.

In the summer of 2014, while writing my Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam Paper, I checked in on the Fourth Turning Discussion Groups that I have been a part of since 2002. There, I saw a link to a Neil Howe blog post (blog.saeculumresearch.com) in which he stated that he and Strauss had decided that the Fourth Turning of our era, the Millennial Saeculum, had likely begun with the Global Financial Crash in the fall of 2008. I believe that this timing may well prove to be right. The ages of the generations was right, with the Millennials fully occupying young adulthood, Generation X fully in mid-life, the Boomers fully occupying elderhood, and the very elder GIs leaving the planet. The generational archetypes were also aligned: the Prophets in elderhood, the Nomads in middle-age, the Heroes in young adulthood, and the young Artists arriving as children.

Recently, I have noticed that people are beginning to talk about the dire nature of the current election. I have also heard forebodings about another economic shock to the system from people I am talking to for my dissertation research and from those involved in other projects with me. These premonitions of dire events to come are not directly a part of my research, but the Strauss and Howe theory may explain some of what I am finding. This was unexpected.

 I have also been anxious and upset about this election, and I have had to take a short break from Facebook in order to keep my focus on my dissertation work. I have been thinking about the election as part of a linear trend toward some totalitarian future, a fascist or socialist dystopia. So I pulled out The Fourth Turning and read it again, paying attention to the cyclical nature of Awakenings and Crises it describes. This gave me hope for the future despite the stresses to the current system that seem to be reaching a saecular maximum.

In the Strauss and Howe Generational Theory, a saeculum is a cycle in time that "spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years. Each cycle is comprised of four Turnings which are eras that come in the same order, saeculum after saeculum since the end of the Middle Ages. Strauss and Howe define the turnings as:

• The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
• The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
•  The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when an old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
• The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. (Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 3)

In my re-reading, I noticed that some of what I remembered from the book was not quite right. I had expected the Fourth Turning Crisis to erupt as the-end-of-the world-as-we-know-it (TEOTWAWKI). But the Strauss and Howe Generational Theory posits a Crisis as a "great gate in history" when civic order reaches its nadir and is rebuilt based on values developed during the Second Turning Awakening. The conclusion of the Crisis and the change in the social mood that follows, marks the beginning of the First Turning High of a new saeculum. Strauss and Howe state that a Crisis begins with some random event that causes a sudden change of the social mood. This happens when the generational archetypes are aligned in a certain order, as I noted above. At that point, members of a society stop drifting along and begin to take responsibility for problems they had ignored during the 3rd Turning Unraveling. The order of the generational archetypes is important, because each one has a particular character marked by their age and place in history.

In the Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe looked at other Crises in the Anglo-American Saecular history. They identified patterns common to each Fourth Turning, even though the particulars of each were different in their timing and events. They wrote that a Crisis has an identifiable morphology. From the Fourth Turning:

Fourth Turnings have provided the great pivot points of the Anglo-American legacy. dating back to the fifteenth century, there have been six. Each produced its own Crisis and its own facsimile of the halcyon spirit today's World War II veterans remember so vividly. From the similarities of these eras, a morphology can be constructed:

• A Crisis era begins with a catalyst--a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.
• Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy--a new counterentropy that reunifies and reenergizes civic life.
• The regenerated society propels toward a climax--a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and the birth of the new.
• The climax culminates in a resolution--a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates winners from losers, resolves the big, public questions, and establishes the new order. (Strauss & Howe, 1997, p. 256). 

According to Strauss and Howe, the regeneracy is a process. It's beginning is marked by the nadir of social order that has been decaying through the Unraveling and into the crisis. The regeneration is complete when "out of the debris of the Unraveling, a new civic ethos arises. One set of post-Awakening ideals prevails over the others" (p. 257). At this point, people use the new synergy to strengthen their communities and instruct their government officials on how to reinforce it.


Before a Crisis begins, say Strauss and Howe, people can foresee the fault lines along which a spark may ignite, but they cannot predict its regeneracy, climax or resolution. However, they say that a regeneracy can be expected 1-5 years into a Crisis. But not all Fourth Turnings are the same. If Strauss and Howe are right about the beginning of this Crisis, we are more than seven years into it, and still the fragmentation from the Unraveling continues. We can see the splintering of our politics continuing among and within the major political parties, and most of the people have not yet united around a particular vision of civic order. In his blog posts on the topic, Howe also stated that the regeneracy is bumped into being by a spark or series of sparks that are more serious than the initial catalyst for the Fourth Turning. However, from the Crash of 2008 until now, the Great Recession has continued, with no marked repair and no sudden change. Although the Obama administration calls it a "recovery," many Americans point out bitterly that it is a "jobless recovery," if a recovery it is.


But this year, people are facing a presidential election that is unique in American history. There is no incumbent candidate. Obama is term-limited out. His party controls the executive branch, but does not control the Congress. The Court is divided, and could lean toward constitutional anarchy with the appointment of the president's nominee. Garland is opposed to the Second Amendment, causing Second Amendment groups and gun-owners to consider their response should the Court try to violate their right to keep and bear arms.

One major party, the Democrats, is running a corrupt criminal who may yet be indicted for mishandling government property. She is also responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, and yet cannot remember that any people were "lost" there under her watch. Their only other declared candidate is an aging "democratic" socialist who promises to continue the trend of taxation and deficit spending that has thus far enslaved our grandchildren to unprecedented debt.

The other major party has gone against the wishes of its conservative base over the course of the last three elections. The Republican front-runner is a Boomer, an inside trader who calls himself an outsider, and he cannot articulate a single policy. But he is popular among true-believers because they think he can, with his pen and phone, make the budding executive branch tyranny stop. But he has unfavorable polls approaching 70% and he is unlikely to be able to win the election. His only serious challenger is a Gen-X outsider, a constitutionalist, who is hated by the party establishment. In fact, the Republican establishment wonks have proposed inserting their own preferred insiders into the process through a brokered convention, which is not the same as a contested convention in which the existing candidates duke it out for the nomination. This would be unique in history. Many observers think this would destroy the credibility of the Republican Party, causing its voters to stay home or vote third party in unprecedented numbers.

The largest "third party," the Libertarian Party, will likely run a popular former governor of New Mexico, who has considerable executive experience and was known for his promotion of individuals rights and liberty, and his use of veto power to keep the budget balanced and stop the state government from violating the liberty of the people. Some Republican wonks are threatening to try to take over the Libertarian Party, should an unwanted candidate be nominated in their own party. Although the threat is unlikely to be successful, because the Libertarian Party National Convention will take place in May, which is before the Republicans have finished their primaries, it is an indicator of the instability within the GOP.

When faced with such an election, many people I know personally or on social media resort to bitter humor, anger, and a sense of impending doom. That sense of doom is only increased by the predictions of further shocks to the economy that may occur as early as this summer. Some economists say that it could result in The Great Devaluation of the American dollar. This would render our money worthless and stop commerce.

These are things that I have had nightmares about.
However, if these are the things of which a regeneracy may be made, so that the old, decaying civic habits are replaced with something new--a new economy, a new political outlook, a new liberty--then the nightmares might be worth it. After the Great Depression and World War II, some people thought that the piper of the old order would still have to be paid, and that the Depression would re-establish itself. Instead, as Americans worked through the war, they developed a new economy, new industry, and a new social ethos. When the war was over, people moved on. They did not go back. They had reset their systems, remitted their debts and established the beginning of new social habits through the regeneracy of that Great Power Crisis.

I posit that this year and this election will mark the regeneracy of the Millennial Crisis. The faults in the old order that the election and the economy are revealing are similar to other saecula. They are also directly related to the values changes precipitated in the 2nd Turning Awkaening and the problems revealed in the 3rd Turning Unraveling. We still cannot foresee what great and perilous events will mark the climax of our passage through this "great gate" in history, and what future will be built out of its resolution. However, we can know that the Fourth Turning is proceeding in a familiar pattern, and that we are not stuck in some nightmare Crisis without end.

My re-reading has given me hope. A good outcome is not a sure thing. Of the ten crises that the Anglo-American generations have passed through, some have had the best possible resolution, some have had good resolutions, and some have had mixed results. However, none so far have ended the civilization that sustains these cycles, and TEOTWAWKI has not happened. It could happen. But I think it is more likely that if we stay the course, fight for our values, restore the power of the civil society and take control of our government, we will see a good resolution to this Fourth Turning. If we work for it, the generations now living can become "repairers of the breech."

OK. Now I can go back to my dissertation with some equanimity.
And yes, I am back to blogging. In late 2013, I had my own crisis, which caused me to reorder my priorities, write and defend my Comps (November 2014), form a dissertation committee, write and successfully defend my dissertation proposal (November 2015). I am now in the "valley of confusion" that is part and parcel of qualitative research. Yes, it is fun! Yes, I will tell you all about it in another post.

9-11: She Stands

 

 

I will never forget that day. It marked me just as surely as Pearl Harbor, Gettysburg and Valley Forge have marked previous generations of Americans.

 

I close my eyes and I see the images: 
A tower burning in a clear, blue September sky.
An airplane flying into a building.
People falling along the side of a building.
Towers falling, one floor into another.
People running through what were once streets.  
Papers falling from the clear blue September sky.
All in silence. Like a dream.

 

And out of the dust and ashes, I see the image: 
She stands.
“Just when you think it might be over
Just when you think the fight is gone
Someone will risk his life to raise her
There she stands  . . .” (10
I remember this as if I had been there.

 

Twelve years. And the tears still come. 
We are wounded in spirit. 
For a clear September sky still evokes
the frozen images as if no time had passed. 
But through the tears we see another rising
to a new and taller stand.
For Americans still rise to greatness, and there she stands. . . (2)

 

There she stands.
It took longer than expected.
And we look back and count the cost.
1776 feet she rises,
There she stands. (2)
The greatest monument to American dead
is to rebuild the alabaster cities of their dreams.
Out of the rubble, we raise them up:
higher, prouder, stronger than before.
She stands.

When evil calls itself a martyr
When all your hopes come crashing down
Someone will pull her from the rubble
There she stands. (1)
Both of them--
the flag and the Freedom Tower (3)
we raise to remind ourselves of
who we are
and to what we commit ourselves.

 

 

“Oh, beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years.
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
undimmed by human tears. . .” (4)

Click through to see a time-lapse video of the rise of the Freedom Tower. (3)

NOTES:
1. There She Stands by Michael W. Smith
2. My words in the spirit of There She Stands, with apologies to Michael W. Smith.
3. I know they changed the name, but for me, it is and will always be Freedom Tower.
4. America the Beautiful by Katherine Lee Bates.

Technorati Tags: 9-11,Memory,American Exceptionalism,Times and Seasons

A Line in the Sand

When liberals talk about "gun culture" . . . It isn't about the guns really, though gun control culture is worried about having that much personal autonomy in the hands of people who don't share their values and like their independence, it's about rural America. And rural America, like guns, is another symbol that stands in for traditional America.
--Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish Blog: Gun Culture and Gun Control Culture

Molṑn labéis ( Molon Labe) is a classical expression of defiance reportedly spoken by King Leonidas I in response to the Persian army's demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae. . . So what does molon labe mean? Well, it is an invitation -- and a challenge -- all rolled into one. From the original Greek molon labe means: "Come and take 'em."
-- JD Longstreet, Right Side News Blog: Americans Won’t Give Up Guns, Law or Not

Technorati Tags: Liberty and Tyranny,Constitution,Individual Rights,Second Amendment

As we end the year here in the rump end of flyover country, we have been talking about the new and even more insidious threats to our liberty and our way of life.  

Americans of a certain bent are fond of talking about “wars” that are not shooting wars. From the Obama administration we have heard that if we do not like our tax money going toward someone else’s contraception, we are perpetrating a “War on Women.” Ronald Reagan brought us the “War on Drugs” (which has become a shooting war down on the border), and LBJ brought us the “War on Poverty” all those years ago. We do not appear to be winning either of these ersatz wars. I am sure there are other “wars” that are not wars out there, and as a Libertarian, I am deeply suspicious of “wars” on inanimate objects or conditions, because they are generally used as an excuse to limit our liberties.

In rural America, however, we have known for some time that the executive branch of the federal government has plans to wage a war on our way of life. It started in 2008 when presidential candidate Barack Obama told his supporters at a San Francisco fundraiser about rural Americans bitterly clinging to “guns and religion.” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTxXUufI3jA). This war isn’t only about guns and religion, both of which the progressive leftists of the Obama administration despise, it is also a war on rural small holders and is being waged by the government against us with bureaucratic weapons such as land use policies, sweeping EPA regulations, and farm bills such as SB 1050, which set the stage for regulations on what we can sell and even what we can consume from our own farms and ranches. 

But the war on “flyover country”—that vast interior of the North American continent that is terra incognita to the progressive city dwellers on the coasts—is heating up because of the fear this administration has of law-abiding, armed citizens. Their maps are not labeled “Here there be Dragons” in fancy, medieval print; rather they say: “Here there be GUNS.” And as Daniel Greenfield pointed out at the Sultan Knish Blog (quoted above), those guns are a symbol to the progressives. They represent  people who do not need or want federal government help, and who often refuse it, knowing from bitter experience that when the Feds come marching in, local interests are no match for the interests of outsiders such as environmentalists and bureaucrats. In the rump end of flyover country we understand that government “help” really means government interference, the destruction of our local economies, and ultimately, tyranny by a metro-majority that doesn’t know a thing about our way of life, fears it, and wishes to force us to conform to an alien and un-American standard.

The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in suburban New Jersey is the incident that Obama, his progressive administration, his media sycophants, and the metro-dependent control freaks have been waiting for. Never mind that the shooter was not a legal gun owner, and as Daniel Greenfield wrote, was not part of what the ubiquitous they call the “gun culture.” They were all indecently salivating to confiscate guns before the little bodies of the innocent were even removed from the classroom. Never let a good crisis go to waste, as their mentor Saul Alinsky liked to say.

Since the 2008 election, Americans have been anticipating that Obama and his minions would be coming for our liberties. Some of us paid attention to what he said before he was elected, and we knew who his mentors were and what political philosophy they bequeathed to him. During November and December 2008, gun sales rose dramatically, and ammunition fairly flew off the shelves of gun shops and sporting goods departments. In Spring 2009, many of us formed and joined Tea Party organizations  and 9-12 groups, banding together to protest the economic consequences of Obama’s socialist political creed. Some of us woke up to the threat to our liberties for the first time. As election day 2012 neared, gun and ammunition sales picked up again, following the same pattern as in 2008. We were aware that with the need of re-election behind him, Obama’s campaign against liberty would likely pick up speed.

On the Tuesday before Sandy Hook, the Catron Kid and I were in Cope Reynold’s Southwest Shooting Authority in Arizona to purchase some ammo and look over a new rifle for shooting coyotes and other small varmints on the ranch. (In rural America our guns are tools, and are most often used to protect livestock from predators. They are rarely drawn against another human being. It is not necessary because we value one another’s life, liberty and property way out here). You may recognize Cope’s name and establishment, because his gun shop has become famous or infamous (depending on your politics) for the sign he posted on his shop’s door:

(See story at The Blaze).

As we looked at the coyote rifle, and as I mock-aimed an AR-15 and an AK-47, feeling them out on my shoulder, we talked about the possibility of an “assault” weapons ban. At that point, Nancy Pelosi was talking about reviving the ban that had been rescinded in 1994, with some new and worrisome restrictions, but not including outright confiscation. The Catron Kid wondered aloud if, should we be threatened with confiscation, we ought to hide our guns. SWSA employees responded that at that point, we would be facing civil war. We talked briefly about how Arizona would respond, and I allowed as to how we should have bought property at least 11 miles west, over the border in Arizona. The conversation turned to why Jews, Blacks, American Indians and Mormons should not be against gun control, and then we make our purchases and went on with our day. As we continued our errands, I realized that I reacted to the thought of civil war differently than before. I did not deny the possibility, nor did I feel regret that I might oppose my own government, because I now believe that my government has made me its enemy. It was another line in the sand that I had crossed in my own mind, like joining the Tea Party, registering Libertarian, and signing the Articles of Freedom. For the record, I will defend the Constitution against all enemies, but I prefer to do my fighting with the pen and at the ballot box. A shooting war is the last thing I want.

Four days later, when the news of Sandy Hook broke, and almost immediately the press began attacking the Second Amendment, we went on the offensive in the social media, correcting the obvious ignorance of the press and the administration, and making it clear why a so-called “assault” weapons ban would not have prevented Sandy Hook or anything like it. It was in a post on a social media site in which someone opined that patriots cannot be serious about the “need” for the Second Amendment, that we certainly can’t be thinking in “these modern times” of protecting our rights against our own government. And she referenced civil war. A commenter replied: “We are already in a civil war,” elaborating that the culture wars against the founding American values, against our liberties and against rural America amount to exactly that.
 
“We are already in a civil war.”
That statement rings true to me. It is not at all the same as during the late 1850's because this is not a regional battle, like the one that the Mason-Dixon Line defined. Neither is it about the false ideology of “state’s rights”--we know that only individuals have rights, and that governments have delegated powers--although I think it is time long past due for the States to enforce  the Tenth Amendment against the Feds. Nor is the object to deny freedom to others or to institutionalize racism. The culture wars—the war on our way of life here in flyover country—is about our individual rights, the ones that are threatened by an out-of-control federal government.

We are already in a civil war.
But it is not a shooting war. And I would rather that it never become one. However, this government has been whittling away at our rights and attacking our values for a very long time. Obama is only the latest and greatest threat in a century-long series of executives determined to stamp out individual liberty, make our Constitution meaningless, and aggregate power to himself.

Each of us, those who value life, liberty and property, must ask ourselves where is the line past which we must resist, physically if necessary? Each of us needs to know for ourselves where is the line in the sand. Where does tyranny stop? And at what point are we willing to give up our lives in order to preserve liberty for ourselves and our children?

As JD Longstreet (quoted above) wrote in Right Side News Blog:

To those on the political left and those pushing gun control -- in the childish naivete -- You need to understand two things: One -- Americans are NOT going to give up their guns! That's one. Number two is this: If you really want to begin a civil war in this country, continue your efforts to take those guns and you will most certainly have one, and I do not think you have any idea, any inkling, of just how ferocious and brutal such a war can be.

We know that Pelosi’s new, draconian measures are not about gun safety. We know that these power-mongers inside the beltway are using the deaths of 20 children for purposes of their own, and those purposes are aimed at our liberties and our ability to defend them.  We know that Diane Feinstein and Harry Reed are both hypocrites—both are or were gun owners who had concealed-carry permits—and they wish to deny the same to us. And we also know that in the advancement of tyranny and totalitarian rule, the confiscation of guns comes before the violation of free speech. An unarmed citizenry has no opportunity to resist the loss of freedom of speech and press and assembly. We know that these rights are already under threat by the Feds, who use pretexts such as security and political correctness to work their nefarious designs. We know that for many of us, the line in the sand may well be confiscation of our rifles. As Longstreet continues:

The government will, as Charlton Heston famously stated, have to "pry the weapons from their cold dead hands." Heck, the government might actually get away with a couple of such encounters before the backlash begins.
But it will begin -- and when it does, there will be hell to pay. In the end, it will be the end of the United States as we know it.
Understand. There are some states that will move to secede rather than obey federal laws that force their citizens to disarm. Other states will arrest and incarcerate federal officers attempting to disarm that states citizens within the physical boundaries of that state.

Understand. These things are already being discussed in states and counties where governments and sheriffs understand their primary duty is to protect the rights of the citizens who elected them. There are many places in flyover country where state and local governments understand that Tenth Amendment pushback against the overweening power-mongering of the federal government is long overdue. Arizona is one.  There are many states and counties in which constitutional sheriffs (CLEOs) take the SCOTUS Printz v. United States (1997) decision seriously, in which SCOTUS held that:

. . . Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the State's officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States' officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policymaking is involved, and no case by case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.

I agree with Longstreet that the Feds are dangerously out of control, and that their cheerleaders in the media and among people in the street are not thinking with their brains, nor are they aware of the cold reception of their totalitarian agenda (for our own good, of course) by the people who live outside of their vivid blue enclaves. The use of emotion by politicians and the media to whip the populace into mob action against citizens, unjustly and unrighteously threatening to violate a fundamental right by confiscation of firearms from law-abiding citizens, will create a response, but not the one the perpetrators envision. Mob rule is contrary to our values, our Constitution and our way of life. There will come a point of firm, determined resistance.



We do not want civil war. We did not seek this war upon our values and our way of life. We want only to be left alone to live our lives. Many of us fervently wish that those who disagree with the Constitution as written, and who dislike our liberty, would remove themselves to a country that has laws and customs in keeping with their progressive values. As Sam Adams wrote:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

These were strong words at the time, and they are strong words now. There is a point at which there can be no more discussion and no more debate about the encroachment upon our liberties. We have been coming close to that point over the past four years, as ordinary Americans have been waking up to smell the bitterness of a government that has long ago lost touch. We know that our elected servants believe that they are the masters, and want to discard the Constitution for a tyranny by the majority,  thus forsaking forever the republican values of liberty and individual rights written in that charter by which they were elected. We recognize that this government is now led by an executive who is unfamiliar with our values and our way of life. He has shown nothing but contempt for us, lying to us by whim, and using every event to dismiss our Constitution and erode our liberties. That he was re-elected by a narrow margin of the popular vote does not give him any other mandate than that assumed by every President of the United States: “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

There is war upon our way of life, against our liberties and our individual sovereignty. We did not seek this war, and thus far we have patiently used peaceful remedies to avert it. This attack is upon the heart of our values as Americans, and rural America is the place where it has begun, but it is not where it will end. This is a battle that we did not seek. But this is a war that we intend to win, in order to secure the lives and liberty of our children and their children. We intend to win it peacefully.
But we will win it at the cost of our lives, if necessary.

To those who intend to force me to surrender my arms, I say: μολὼν λαβέ!
And I am not alone.

Shabbat Shuvah: The Foreign Gods of Today

Technorati Tags: Times and Seasons,High Holy Days,American Exceptionalism,Torah Study

“The Eternal said to Moses:

You are about to sleep with your fathers,

and this people will rise up and go astray

after foreign gods, where they will go to be

among them, and break my Covenant . . .

and many troubles and evils shall befall them.”

Devarim 31: 16, 17

As Jews, we are now in the midst of the Ten Days of Turning, the days between Rosh Hashanah, when we celebrate the Birthday of the World, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn holy day of the year. The Sabbath that falls between these two holy days is Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath on which rabbis and maggids (preachers) commonly give a sermon on the art of turning and returning to the path of righteousness.

When the Engineering Geek and I took a few moments for Torah Study on Shabbat, with all of what had happened in the past weeks in mind, we noticed a part of Parashat Vayelich that the Women of Reform Judaism’s Torah Commentary remained silent about. Devarim  (Deuteronomy) is set as Moses’ last speech, with some interpolations that move the story along. In Vayelich (He Went), Moses learns that he has reached the end of his long life, and that he will die before the people Israel enter the promised land. The Women’s Commentary therefore focuses on what this means for Moses, and the reasons given and implied for his death at the moment of his people’s freedom.

But given the stark choices that confront us all in the world today, and the contradictory and craven behavior of our Executive  Branch in the face of the renewed attacks on the United States through our embassies--attacks used to threaten our most basic freedoms--the Engineering Geek and I focused on the passage that the commentary passed over. In it, a prediction is made by the Eternal. The people will cross over, and they will build lives in the land, and become complacent (“. . . they shall have eaten their fill and waxed fat. . .”, 31:20), and that is when they will be vulnerable to turning away from their heritage and their purpose, and follow after foreign gods that they have not experienced. When this happens they will, the story predicts, forsake the Covenant, and bring upon themselves many “troubles and evils.”

In encountering this story, we ask ourselves, what are foreign gods in the context of our identity as Americans today? Most of us do not literally bow down to idols of wood and stone made by our own hands. And many of us bow down to no gods at all. Further, this passage is about what happens when many members of a society make a choice to change their basic beliefs about their civil identity, and forsake the heritage given them by previous generations.

In Hebrew, the United States is known as Artzot ha-Brit shel Amerika, ( ארצות הברית של אמריקה) the Land of the Covenant in America. This is a recognition that our unique identity is forged not by blood ties, but that who we are is based on our choice to abide by a set of ideas that are protected by an contract, the Constitution of the United States.

On September 11, 2001, many of us were rudely made aware for the first time in a generation that our ideas about who human beings are and what we define as the good life in our civilization were under attack; that another set of ideas opposes ours, and that proponents of those alien ideas are willing to make war upon us, and to fight and die to see that their ideas prevail in the world. On that day, as the towers fell, we instinctively drew together, and the day after, we put up our flags and remembered that we were Americans.

As the EG and I talked about all this, we realized that we Americans had grown complacent indeed, and that we have been in the process of forsaking our Covenant of respect for individual rights, thereby giving up cherishing the uniqueness of each individual, and had begun to turn away toward concepts foreign to our native values. This hankering after dependency and collectivism, the easing of responsibility and individual liberty, was possible because we forgot the origin of the wealth and innovation that made our comfort and ease possible. In so doing, we were turning to foreign gods, ideas that are in opposition to our Covenant, and cannot possible co-exist with it.

Islamic thought, with its focus on totalitarian submission to a theocratic state, has developed from premises alien to our enlightenment values, and is driven by a civilization that is not at all complacent or passive. Islamic teaching emphasizes the necessity of bringing the whole world into submission to ideas that are incompatible with our own. Our Western forbearers have resisted these idols before, at Tours with Charles Martel, and twice at the Gates of Vienna. 

But now, with our Covenant weakened by dreams of collectivist utopias, we see our leaders actively chasing after alien ideas, appeasing our enemies with apologies, and proclaiming a willingness to surrender our basic rights to foreign gods. We must rethink our liberties, they say, in the face of the Ba’al of the Riot and the Mob. It is our children whose birthright of freedom is to be sacrificed to satisfy the insatiable fires of the barbarian hordes.

And yet, there are those among us who have sounded the alarm that there can be no compromise with those who wish to supplant our values with their own, and no surrender without the total loss of our American identity. Like the prophet in the Haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, they tell us:

“Asshur shall not save us . . .neither will we call anymore the work of our hands our gods . . .”

“Give not your heritage up to reproach, that the nations should make you a byword; Should they say among the peoples: Where is their G-d?”

We cannot make treaties with the alien thought of Egypt and Libya and at the same time retain our own unique identity. Foreign ideas and values cannot be assimilated without destroying our own. Oil and water do not mix, and nobody can compromise with poison and live.
It is one or the other, and we must not listen to those who would so lightly surrender our liberty, our values and principles to those who would destroy us. 

It is amazing how the struggles of old, couched in religious language, are relevant still, and tell the same stories that we experience, although we tell of them differently. 
Just as Israel of old had to choose or be broken on the contradiction between her identity and that of the idols, the same is true for us today. We must choose rightly or be broken on the contradiction between our own values and those of Egypt and Libya and the whole of the Muslim Brotherhood with its Islamist nightmare. Liberty and submission cannot be combined. Individual rights will not co-exist with the Ummah, the collective nation of the Islamic State. 

It is my hope that in this season of turning we gather the courage to say what is real, and  to acknowledge the truth in our hearts. And that we do not close our eyes to the troubles and evils that are about to befall us, and that we recognize that they are a consequence of the fact that we are in the act of forsaking our Covenant, the one that has made us the envy of the world and an inspiration to among the nations.

We need to wake up and to recognize how greatly we have prospered by the values and principles bequeathed to us by our founders, so that we can preserve our liberties and bequeath our inheritance—the Covenant of Rights and Liberties—to our posterity.

This remains my hope in the face of growing darkness.

Our Hearts He Broke: The Provocation of the Mosque

"Our hearts he broke, he burned the Torah,

burned the Torah,

Ash and smoke and crushed Menorah,

crushed Menorah.

Antiochus, Antiochus."

--Hayo, Haya

In the time of Hadrian, Emperor of Rome, the study and practice

of Torah were forbidden. The teachers of Israel said: "How survive

without the Tree of Life? Why live when the soul is dead?" And so

they taught and learned and in doing so, Israel's ten

martyrs were taken and doomed. . . Hanniniah ben Teriadon

was wrapped in a Scroll of the Law and placed on a pyre

of green brushwood and burned alive. As he was so burned,

he opened his mouth and cried: "I see! I see!"

His students asked: "Master, what do you see?" And he answered:

"I see the parchment burning while the letters of the Law soar upward . . ."

What we have here is a story of provocation and counter-provocation. They are not equal in weight.

The original provocation--the announcement that a mosque-cum-community center will be built at Ground Zero--is explosive. The site has become to Americans a sacred place. A place to which the entire people of the United States look to honor those who were murdered by fire on that day so awful that it instantly became known by its numbers: 9-11. Most of the bodies of the dead were never recovered, having been vaporized in the extreme heat of burning jet fuel, or pulverized into elements and compounds by the weight of the buildings coming down upon their heads. There is no cemetary to go to, no place where the mortal remains of the murdered have been laid to rest. There is only a hole in the ground and a reflecting pool at the place where they died. A place that is on some of the most expensive real estate in the civilized world. They are in some ineffable way there, where their lives were deliberately taken, in the name of Islam; and when we go there or hearken to them in our hearts that were broken that day, we are standing in that sacred space.

That those buildings, full of civilians who went there to work in the service of their own individual lives, goals and happiness, were attacked and destoyed in the name of Islam, is not in dispute. The men who planned the hijacking of the airplanes--and the murder of everyone on them as well--and the men who duly flew them into the Twin Towers, all did so in the name of jihad--holy war--a duty for all who have submitted to the god of Islam in the name of Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam. That there are those Moslems who do not accept such behavior in their own names is real enough, but very few of them have publically abjured the murder of the "infidel" in the name of jihad and in the name of Islam. And even if the vast majority of Muslims worldwide had stood up against the jihadists of that day, and even if they had not celebrated the murder of innocents from 'Arabia to Zanzibar', they would have so stood against these murders out of shame for what was done in the name of Islam,and in their own names.

It is simply unbelievable that Imam Faisel Rauf and his wife do not understand how absolutely inappropriate is the construction of a mosque anywhere near the sacred place where innocents were deliberately killed in the name of Islam. If this Imam is indeed a moderate Muslim who understands American culture, then he knows. And his wife knows, too.

It would be like erecting a shrine to German culture at Auschwitz. It is true that every German did not condone the actions of the German National Socialist Party, and nevertheless the murder of European Jews was done in their name. Most German individuals are not responsible for those murders, but nevertheless they have the sensitivity to understand the pain such a building would bring to the survivors and their families. They have manners. And of course, Germans the world over do not dance in the streets to cheer on the Nazis, nor do they regularly gather in large groups to shout "Death to the Jews." A majority of Muslims the world over have and do. And the Imam and his wife dwell in America and could stand to develop some sensitivity toward American values, manners and mores. That they refuse to do so casts great doubt upon their stated motives.

In a very real sense, Ground Zero represents to Americans the burning of sacred text. The sacred text that is written large upon the lives of ordinary Americans, who in going about their daily work were in that moment pursuing happiness. They were the living text of the American dream. And in the next moment, the jet fuel brought upon their heads by the jihadist hijackers turned them and the work of their hands into an auto-da-fe for Islam. When the buildings came down and the ashes poured through the streets of Manhattan, we all watched the sacred letters of their lives rise toward the heavens in the form of a myriad of papers wafting into the perfectly clear blue Tuesday morning sky.

The mosque at that sacred place, the place where the living texts of American lives were vaporized, crushed and burned, all in the name of Islam, is a very large provocation. It is made even larger by the habit Islamists have had for centuries, the habit of erecting their mosques on the crushed ruins of places of worship the world over; the ruins of the peoples that Islam has conquered by the sword.

It should stop here. It should stop now. If there is a moderate Islam--and we are waiting to see evidence of it in the actions of the supposed moderate Imam Rauf--then such triumphalism should end now. At Ground Zero, that sacred place.

Moral Self-Confidence and the Western Way of War: Part I

NOTE: This entry will be presented in two parts. Part I will discuss the problem--that the West is no longer engaging in the Western Way of War, and perhaps no longer believes in the purpose of it, as well as the way that the United States has gained victory through its exceptional use of the Western Way of War as dictated by the Constitution. Part II will discuss the philosophical reasons why the West and the United States choose not engage in war to win, namely a loss of moral confidence in the goodness of our way of life.

Today, as Hamas and Hezbollah--Iran's proxies--sit poised to begin a war with Israel, Caroline Glick posted her latest Jerusalem Post column on her blog. The column, called The Western Way of War, was actually more of a discussion of how the West has left behind the way of war that, as Victor Davis Hanson described in his book by the same name as Glick's column, is "a ferocious, brief, head-on clash" that serves the same purpose as the Western invention of consensual government: namely to achieve a quick and decisive end to a dispute.

Glick's column, on the topic of General Stanley McChrystal's resignation, focused on what Americans and Israelis might learn, not from McChrytal's military faux pas of being publically critical of the President of the United States, but by confronting "the unpleasant truth about the problematic nature of the the Western way of war in the 21st century."

In her discussion concerning the morale problem for Americans in Afganistan, Glick says:

Due to the administration's aversion to civilian casualties, preventing civilian casualties has become a chief fighting aim for the US military. Yet since the Taliban war effort relies on civilian infrastructures and human shields, the strategic significance of preventing civilian casualties is that US forces' ability to fight the Taliban is dramatically circumscribed.

Far from being the time-honored "Western way" in war which is total war fought for victory and the unconditional surrender of the enemy, and which leads to peace, trade with the former enemy, and eventually even alliances with the same, the warefare of the 21st century leads to stalemate, endless war and/or withdrawal without change in the conditions that led to the war. As Glick says:

The important story this week was not about a US general with abysmal judgment about the media. Rather the story is that in Afghanistan, the US is repeating a sorry pattern of Western nations of not understanding - or perhaps not caring -- that if you are not willing to fight a war to victory, you will lose it.

This is exactly the problem in Afganistan. To win the war and free the region from the Taliban, the United States must utterly defeat the Taliban. But for the Taliban to win, they must only wait out the increasingly leadership challenged United States and her allies. One reason for this problem is that the United States went to war without clear objectives, and the war has therefore suffered from "mission creep" which in Afganistan consisted of the goal changing from killing Osama bin Laden and destroying terrorist bases, to the goal of "nation building". This, in a part of the world ruled by ancient tribal alliances and hatreds, and where the concept of a nation-state is as foreign as the concept of individual destiny, is bound to be disastrous.

But the problem of choosing wisely with respect to how to go to war and why, is not the core of the issue. The core is why on earth the United States or any other Western country or alliance thereof, would deviate from the successful Western way of war as it has evolved to modernity. Before considering this question, though, a discursion on how the United States has developed the Western way of war is instructive.

In the United States that way can be defined by the following steps, all of which rest on the idea that the only moral reason for a war is defensive. (This does not mean that offensive strategy and tactics cannot be used in order to defeat the enemy; it only means that the causus belli must be due to attack or invasion). A Constitutional war must rest on the values enshrined therein. A war for empire can never be justified by these values. The steps are:

1. Use of Constitutional means to declare war thus acquiring the consent and support of the people as required for success on the part of a Constitutional Republic.

This means that the people at home are interested in how the war is being fought, and its outcome; and they generally constrain politicians from interfering in the strategy and tactics of the battles. In a proper Constitutional war, it is the duty of the civilian leadership to determine the goals that measure victory, and it is up to military leadership to determine the objectives, strategy and tactics to meet those goals.

2. Fight a total war to a decisive victory; that is, fight to win.

This can only happen when the people have consented to the losses required, and when they have a stake in the outcome. This is why a Constitutional declaration of war is necessary in the first place--it requires that a war be fought only when it is in the interest of the United States to do so as determined by the people themselves.

3. Define victory as the absolute defeat and unconditional surrender of the enemy.

The absolute defeat of the enemy is the only way to convince him that the ideas that brought him to make offensive war are bankrupt and false, and that there is nothing to gain by making such a war ever again.

4) Once a peace treaty is established, offer mercy and compassion to the people of the defeated country or region.

This is part of American exceptionalism--unlike wars for empire which result in enslaving the defeated enemy--usually by killing the men, making the women whores and the children, slaves--once a free people has defeated the enemy, thus obviating the ideas that led to war, they then lift up the enemy and make the people into trading partners, allies and friends.

In our new and unique way of dealing with war, forged from the Western tradition of consensual government and the Western Way of War, the United States has been successful in totally defeating traditional Honor/Shame societies, and in then rebuilding them to become successful modern societies that respect the rights of their own people as well as those of others. As the psychologist David Gutman, (University of Chicago) put it:

. . .the United States has successfully fought and tamed Shame/Honor societies in the past. The Confederacy, the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, all paradigm Shame/Honor societies, were all overcome in total wars, and all became either part of our nation, or our trusted Democratic allies. And it now begins to appear that Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan will join their company.
There appears to be a uniquely American approach to war – one combining ruthlessness and mercy - that can lead to such unexpectedly good outcomes. ("Symposium: Islamic Terror and Sexual Mutilation", FrontPage Magazine, Friday, February 13, 2009).

The agenda of Islamo-fascism comes from such an honor/shame system, which is not compatible with individual rights and the Rule of Law. In such a culture, the fight can never end until honor has been restored and the enemy that has shamed one is destroyed.

As Caroline Glick continued in her article:

For years, citizens of free nations have willfully ignored or dismissed the significance their enemies' gruesome goals and ideology. They have claimed that what these people stand for is insignificant. At the end of the day, they say, the only reason there are wars is because the nations of the West provoke them by being strong. And so, when they have fought wars, they have fought them with strategies that can bring them nothing but defeat.

The question now becomes what has caused the West and the United States to decide not to engage the Western Way of War in order not only to utterly defeat the enemy, but also to remake him into a partner and a friend? The answer to this question is philosophical and involves the issue of moral confidence. Part II will engage this question.