“Mr. Santorum has been at odds with the modernist impulse, or liberalism, or whatever it now and fairly should be called. Most of his own impulses--protect the unprotected, help the helpless, respect the common man--have not been conservative in the way conservative is roughly understood, or portrayed, in the national imagination. If this were the JFK era, his politics would not be called "right wing" but "progressive." He is, at heart, a Catholic social reformer. Bobby Kennedy would have loved him.”
She actually characterized Rick Santorum as a progressive. Displaying such utter disregard for truth in a widely read column took some real chutzpah! My hat is off to her on that one.
Just a few days ago, our gal Peggy lamented that "We’re Scaring our Children to Death”:
“This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of RooseveltHigh School in Los Angeles. The mural is big--400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak--and eye-catching, as would be anything that ‘presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans.’ Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times's Bob Sipchen, who noted ‘the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus's Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.’
What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:
The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.
We are scaring our children to death. Have you noticed this? And we're doing it more and more.”
How could that school have been so reckless? What could possibly have compelled those hopelessly irresponsible school administrators to reveal the truth about the genocide waged by Western Europeans against the indigenous people of Turtle Island? How dare they expose our children to such heresy! Leave Hollywood and video game manufacturers to saturate our youth with heaping portions of gratuitous fantasy violence to distract them from the horrific decimation we US Americans have been inflicting on the rest of the world for many years.
In June 2002, Ms. Noonan wrote “Capitalism Betrayed” for the Journal:
“I have been reading Michael Novak, the philosopher and social thinker and, to my mind, great man. Twenty years ago this summer he published what may be his masterpiece, "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism." It was a stunning book marked by great clarity of expression and originality of thought. He spoke movingly of the meaning and morality of capitalism. He asked why capitalism is good, and answered that there is one great reason: Of all the systems devised by man it is the one most likely to lift the poor out of poverty.
Mr. Novak answered by quoting the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who once observed that affluence in fact inspires us to look beyond the material for meaning in our lives. "It's exactly because people have bread that they realize you can't live by bread alone. ‘In a paradoxical way, said Mr. Novak, the more materially comfortable a society becomes, the more spiritual it is likely to become, "its hungers more markedly transcendent.’"
If capitalism is the system “most likely to lift the poor out of poverty”, it is strikingly counterintuitive that millions plunged into inhuman working conditions, wage slavery, child labor, and economic misery when the United States practiced a much “purer” form of capitalism around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Interestingly, now that US capitalism has been “tainted” through evolution into a “mixed economy”, working conditions and wages have improved significantly. Yet our unimaginably wealthy nation still has over a million homeless, a high infant mortality rate, nearly 50 million people without viable means to attain health care, and about 13% of our population living in poverty. Apparently these wretched souls must wait for the materially comfortable members of our society to evolve spiritually and begin ministering to the poor.
On Thursday, August 25, 2005, Peggy cautioned us to “Think Dark”:
"The Pentagon says this huge and historic base-closing plan will save $50 billion over the next two decades. They may be right. But it's a bad plan anyway, a bad idea, and exactly the wrong thing to do in terms of future and highly possible needs.
The Pentagon has some obvious logic on its side--we have a lot of bases, and they cost a lot of money--and numbers on paper. They have put forward their numbers on savings, redundancies, location and obsolescence.
But they're wrong. What they ought to do, and what the commission reviewing the Pentagon's plan ought to do, is sit down and think dark.
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