Fully Slouched

In finishing up Bork back to back with Zinn, and receiving back “What’s the Matter With Kansas” that I read last fall, I have some more general observations. My first is that to some degree, there must be something “middle of the road” with the USA since BOTH liberals and conservatives see a lot of problems. It would seem to be clear that nobody has successfully achieved anything like a complete rout, and the general 50/50 nature of today’s electorate would tend to bear that out.

“Kansas” has been a fairly darling book in liberal circles, so apparently they enjoy a non-stop whine from beginning to end that “anyone that votes on values rather than economics is an idiot”. It just took a lot of pages to say that over and over again and watch Thomas Franks (the author) shake his head and roll his eyes in text at the stupidity of the general population and inherent evil of the Republicans misleading the poor, backward, religious Kansans.

If Democrats really believe values issues are unimportant next to economics, they can quickly drop their stances on abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools and obscenity. Once they made that “simple switch”, all the poor foolish Republicans would HAVE to vote for them on the economic issues, and since the values issues are a fools errand, the Democrats would have achieved it all without losing anything of “value”.

Of course, more and more people realize that it is business, not government that provides the jobs and economic growth. The idea that Democrats are going to “give you more” doesn’t necessarily follow from their PROMISES to give you more. One would have to not only “agree” with them that values are stupid, which is obviously lie #1, since they don’t really believe that for their values, it is just the opposite of their values that are stupid!

 Even assuming that belief, one would also need to believe that they would be able to follow through on providing more economically while at the same time tending strongly toward being anti-business. It is easy to see that guys like Franks are angry, what isn’t perfectly clear is if they are liars or just don’t get it. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter … they aren’t likely to give up their side of the values issue, and their prospects for more goods to distribute are marginal as well.

Bork never mentioned Zinn, but Zinn mostly steps right up and agrees with everything that Bork has against the left. Zinn is happy to support the overthrow of the US Government, removal of standards from the university (they are all racist and capitalist anyway), increased violence and drug use (prisons are racist), the destruction of the family, the destruction of religion, and most of Bork’s other complaints. What our present state of education and media bias generally prevent is the masses realizing the true nature of people like Zinn. 

The media demonizes folks like Bork and sanitizes Zinn. In recent months, Fox news has gone after a few of the more egregious university charlatans … Ward Churchill being the most noxious, but for the general public it is unlikely that they have tumbled that for every supposed “devil” like Bork on the right, there are 100 like Churchill and Zinn that are indoctrinating the university students every day.

One of the major tasks comes down to dealing with the Supreme Court. If the two sides are just whining at each other about legislation, there is always the next election in which to change the tide and make the laws different. With abortion, and likely soon gay marriage, it takes enough of a shift in the court to overturn (or prevent) the court from changing the constitution and cutting off the ability of the people to govern themselves. The task of BOTH finding judges that are “conservative”, yet willing to overturn Roe is a daunting task on it’s own, but the likely 60 votes needed to get each of them through the Senate raises the bar even higher.

Despair is never a good option, and Bork walks perilously close at times. That is the biggest weakness of the book. It is true that having, maintaining, and restoring standards and morals are tough work, but most things that are worthwhile are. It is very possible to “slouch” to Gomorrah and a lot of other bad in life … those that don’t want to follow that route have to study, pray, and work very hard to counter our own and societies trend for forever slipping into greater entropy. It is a task we are equipped to handle, Bork gives a sober look at how hard the task really is.