Pajamas Media

Well, the Tea party movement is not even a year old, and already it is holding its first national convention. I was honored to be ask to speak at the West Los Angeles event on September 12^th of last year, so unlike most of the talking heads you see opining on the Tea Party movement, at least I am one of the very few to have been to one personally.

Now the most remarkable thing about that remarkable experience is something that is very hard to put into words. It’s the quality that makes me reluctant to try and tell you what it is, because it clearly is so many different things to so many people.  And that grass-roots, “never-done-this-before” sense of excitement and empowerment is the first thing that really hits you.

These are the most regular, decent people you’ll meet, and with very few exceptions not one of them has been involved in politics in any way. It’s just that – like so many of us — They’ve just had enough!

Of course, the media coverage has tried very hard to portray the normal, average, every-day Americans of the Tea party rallies as dangerous and angry racists and Wal-Mart knuckle-draggers, while identifying the mass-produced signs, the mass-produced T-shirts, the mass-produced members of bused-in wiccan nihilist anarcho-Maoist lesbian eco-weenie anti-war protestors as somehow the genuine voice of the American people.

So as a person who has been there, let me try and explain what I think this whole movement is about.

The people I have met at these events were generally the happy, decent, hard-working people that make up the vast middle of Silent America. They are not bitter, and they are not “consumed with rage.”

But they — I mean, we – are angry. We have a right to be angry. As a matter of fact, we not only have a right but in fact have an obligation to be angry. The spending orgy in Washington brought on by the Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the election of the most liberal member of the Senate to the office of the Presidency is taking the country off the edge of a cliff and everybody knows it.

This spending is so monumental, so out of control and so beyond the pale that huge numbers of what were honest, decent, hard-working and unassuming citizens no longer feel like taxpayers but rather like host organisms: we find ourselves staggering around in shock, like victims of a plane crash or some natural disaster, looking around at the destruction of the work ethic that gave five percent of the population an economy four times the size of its nearest competitor. We watch, horrified, at the government takeover not of businesses or industries but entire sectors of the free market.  That’s why there’s a Tea Party.

You know what this is reckless, Imperial orgy of spending feels like? It feels like coming out of the showing in the morning, dazed and exhausted after a good night’s sleep, and stepping in front of a mirror to find yourself covered in leeches that are sapping not just the blood it takes to make government function, but rather all of it – every last living drop of it – to fund entitlements and work projects and boondoggles of every description: congressional “climate change” junkets that include skiing and snorkeling days in New Zealand, and Bridges to Nowhere, and the use of Air Force jets as the personal chauffeurs not only of the Speaker of the House but for her families and cronies business cronies, too. We see a President who talks about sharing hardship but who then decides to go out on date night and catch a show in New York City and ends up spending every single tax dollar you and your kids will make in your entire life: gone!

Gone! What did you get for it? Nothing. What service did it do the country? None! So why did they spend it? Because – listen now – they spent it because that’s not your money. That’s their money. Just because you got up in the morning, sat in traffic, and worked all day before sitting in traffic again to come home exhausted… that doesn’t mean it’s your money to these bloodsucking, leather-winged, Big Government entitlement-mongers. No, that’s their money to spend as they see fit – and not just all the money you send in in taxes today, or next year, or the next ten years – they – Democrats and Republicans too – have spent all the money you will make in your lifetime, and then spent all of the money your kids will make, and the pool of work that your grandkids will do in 2060 or so – that’s mostly been spent too.  

You want to know why we’re angry? What once was a social compact between the people and their representatives has rotted away into this: a people no longer paying a reasonable price for the limited number of things that only a government can provide, but rather victims of identity theft – people who open a monthly credit card statement only to discover fifty thousand dollars of vacations not taken, and jet skis and plasma TV’s paid for but never delivered. That’s why there’s a Tea Party.

Now some critics of the Tea Party movement say it is hypocritical to complain about Democrat spending without complaining about Republican spending as well.  Well, there are two things to say about that: first, that is a profound insight from someone who has obviously never been to a Tea Party event, because if they had been there, they would know that the real thunderbolts thrown in response to this spending orgy is aimed not ad the Democrats but rather the Republicans; the people who should know better, the people, in fact, that we thought would be standing guard over our hard-earned treasure, not shoveling it out the door by the fork-full.

Secondly, I’ll just let this graph do the talking.

The grey bars are Bush’s Deficits. Notice that they were declining yearly in his second term, until TARP – which President Obama claimed as his own personal miracle – drove them up during his last year.  Now look at the red bars: that’s Obama’s spending: four times Bush’s last year – the spike of TARP included — and not for an emergency fix of the banks, but rather to buy things like ATV trails on one hand and General Motors on the other, all in the name of “stimulus,” which, we were promised, would cap unemployment at 8% instead of the nine or 10% we would see without the line at the government cash trough.  The official unemployment rate is now at least ten percent; some analysts say the true number may now be half again that, or even double.

Oh, and by the way, shocking and damning though this graph is, it’s a little long in the tooth. The fact is, this President and Congress have been waging a year-long war against business and the evil, evil wealthy, who, needless to say, have decided to keep their heads down, produce less, and pay less in taxes.

Here’s a graphic that better illustrates the real effect of the decreased revenues as a result of this war on the private sector:

That’s why there’s a tea Party.

So what’s ahead? Well, no one knows, least of all me. But I do have a very strong sense of what should be ahead.

Despite the authentic and wholly justified sense of betrayal that many conservatives feel at the hands of the GOP, I think that talks of a third party are suicide: not only permanent minority status, but also handing the store over to the people most intent on robbing it – forever.

The Tea Party Movement is really the conservative movement. It’s like a soul that has somehow been cut off from its physical body, and now both wander the landscape, trying to decide what to do. Because if the Tea Party movement is the grass-roots, common-man philosophical soul of small government and personal liberty and responsibility, then the Republican party is the skeletal structure – the bones and arteries and sinews needed to live in the real world.

The only road to success and recovery from this rocket-sled of ruin is to re-unite these two elements. We tried that, actually: Tea Party passion and internet fundraising, plus GOP ground operations, call centers, networks and so forth, and this was the result:

Pretty damn impressive!  

Now, was Scott Brown the perfect conservative candidate? To many – even many who supported him – he was not. That’s not the question we should be asking. The question we should be asking – and did ask, it seems – is not whether Scott Brown is more conservative than Ronald Reagan. The question is whether or not Scott Brown is more conservative than Ted Kennedy or Martha Coakley.

He is, and by a very wide margin. That’s a win!

Victory is a ratchet. To retake this country we need every gain we can get – no matter how small – and give up as little as possible. If Scott Brown – Republican Senator from Massachusetts – turns out to be the most liberal man in the Senate then we’re living in paradise. That’s why there’s a Tea Party. And that’s why being a part of the Tea Party movement is, when it is all said and done, just plain fun.

And a final note: do you know who we owe the remarkable success of the Tea Party movement to? We owe it to Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olberman, and Chris Matthews. We owe it to Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and barack Obama – not just for the political motivation, but because they decided to make it personal.

By calling us Tea Baggers, and racists, and Nazis, and rubes, and hicks… by pretending we’re just a fringe group of dangerous radicals, or saying – as the President did, twice, and apparently with a straight face – that he was unaware that tens or hundreds of thousands of hard-working American patriots were clogging the streets of the city he lives in – well all of these geniuses poured can after can of lighter fluid on to what might have been some old, wet charcoal – nearly impossible to light – and turned it into a wildfire that will likely remake the landscape of this country.  That’s why there’s a Tea Party.

So thanks, you big-brain, sneering, socialist ninnies! We couldn’t have done it without you.

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[I've been working like crazy on several projects outside of E3 and PJTV, and had so many plates spinning on sticks that I've felt like that giant plaster statue of the mammoth trying to crawl out of the La Brea tar pits. Needless to say, most of my energies have been spent on Afterburners.  I have to write a serious essay a week, shoot, edit and air it... and to that extent I've utterly neglected Eject! Eject! Eject!  Even the personal interaction I used to have in the comments has moved to my Facebook page, so things have been pretty lonely here while I was trying to figure out a long-term plan.

Well, from now on, a few things are going to change that should improve the level of service around here. First, I'm going to post the Afterburner essays here at E3, in text form, as soon as or perhaps even before they hit the air on PJTV. I've been so busy making them as TV segments that I have neglected to post them as written essays, and they hold up very well in that regard, I must say. So there will current Afterburners, some of the backlog of unpublished old Afterburners, and a continuation of re-posting the Silent America essays, which did not survive the move from the old site very well.

I hope to embed the YouTube version of the Afterburners as soon as they become available, too.  Also, I plan to provide a few paragraphs several times a week on a story that catches my attention. These, I believe, are called "blog posts" and apparently can be less than 17 pages long! I will give this radical new idea a try as well.

Look for more action here -- a lot more -- starting now.  And to get continuous updates on everything I write or shoot, you can't beat my Facebook page (link above) or follow me on Twitter @Bill Whittle]

If you asked the average American on the street what kind of government we have, they’d likely as not say we live in a democracy. A democracy is – by definition – where the people rule.

But we don’t live in a democracy. You don’t get to determine when or if our country goes to war. You don’t get to decide whether we drill for oil in Alaska. You don’t even get to decide how much of your own money is taken away from you – by force, if need be.

Unless, of course, you are one of 535 special Americans. Those people live in a democracy. The rest of us live in a Republic. This is an important thing to fully grasp – not just academically, but deep in your marrow.  You need to understand this in your very bones.

308 million American lives are determined by 435 members of the House of Representatives. Now the real number varies by district, of course, but on average, that means that every member of the House speaks for about 708 hundred thousand Americans.  Imagine seven Super Bowls filled to the brim, arranged in a circle, all emptying out into one massive parking lot. Imagine every singe man, woman and child from seven Super Bowls spilling out into one giant field… and there, on a small soap box, sits one man or woman who determines whether or not they go to war, how much they will be taxed, whether or not they will be able to see the doctor of their choosing, and thousands of other little tendrils of control over their very lives. That’s the House.

For the Senate, imagine every single person in your entire state! – in California that’s about fifty Superbowl stadiums – and all of them beholden to two – two! — men or women.  

That’s a Republic. And despite the mind-numbing terror of it, it’s actually not a bad way to go. But why would so many free citizens be willing to put their lives and their fortunes into the hands of so few people?

Well, we would do it if we believed that the person in question was one of us. We do it because we believe that the person we send to Washington represents not every little detail but at least the core of our values and desires, our needs and our hopes. We do it because the person – in theory, now – has led a life at least somewhat like our own: known some hardship, and some success; tried to start a business or at least worked in one, as the huge vast majority of us do. They need to know who we are so that they can speak for us.

That is the one crucial element that makes a republic work. I may be Constitutionally entitled to have a defense attorney if I am accused of a crime, but if that person sleeps through my trial his physical presence is irrelevant since I am not being represented.  And that disconnect between having a representative and actually being represented is what drove the election of Scott Brown.

At its core, the people of America’s bluest state found in the red candidate with the truck was in every way more like most of them than the Democrat with the pedigree and the endorsement of the state royalty.

On the eve of First Bull Run, in the heady days before the first big battle when everyone – North and South – though the Civil War was to be a ninety-day affair, President Lincoln looked out from his window in the White House at the fresh-faced men marching off to Manassas Junction.

“There are many single regiments,” wrote Lincoln “whose members, one or another, possess full practical knowledge of all the arts, sciences, professions and whatever else, whether useful or elegant, is known to the world, and there is scarcely one from which there could not be selected a President, a Cabinet, a Congress and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself. Nor do I say this is not true also in the Army of our late friends, now adversaries in this contest.”

This sentiment of Lincoln’s reflects more than just a love of the American people, professed, whether true or not, by all politicians. Lincoln did not only love the American people. Lincoln – as did Reagan and a few others – respected and admired the common American citizen. Reagan, and Lincoln, held themselves to be servants of these free and industrious people, and did not fancy themselves their nannies or their nursemaids and certainly not their betters.  Contrast that attitude with the Imperial sense of noble obligation we see in this Congress and this President, at their smug, condescending and self-appointed role as the saviors of we poor, uneducated little people, who without their guidance can not dress or feed or employ ourselves.

So which view – elitist or populist — is correct? Well, what does history show? The attitude of Jefferson, and Lincoln, and Reagan, is that the collective genius of hundreds of millions of free people over two and a half centuries – we call this vast subterranean cavern of wisdom and experience “common sense” – is baked into our society and its traditions. That belief in the practicality, energy and ingenuity of the common man took a small group of rugged, proud and hard-working individuals and turned them into the most powerful, innovative, influential and decent nation in the history of the world, while all around us, for two and a half centuries, other nations have allowed pedigreed elites of one stripe or another to compete against us and be utterly left in the dust – every one of them.

All of the government intrusions into the free market that brought us the housing collapse were the result of isolated and imperial elitists who had no experience whatsoever in the real world of business, but were rather academics and lawyers who had a transparently untenable theory and the political power to enforce it.  All of the exotic financial instruments to arise from this government intrusion – things like collateralized debt obligations – were the result of elitist Harvard MBA’s and not the failures of small, regional, common-sense banks that had the collective wisdom not to make loans to people who could not pay them back.

The most destructive and – by the way – power mad president of the last century, Woodrow Wilson, was an academic – in fact, he was the President of Princeton University. And the man who appears to be planted firmly in his footsteps with his plan to replace rule by the people with rule by Czars and Professors and Lawyers and other elitists, Barack Obama, is also an academic, having been a Professor at Columbia. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan – who after fifty years of appeasement at the behest of the best and the brightest decided to and then did defeat the greatest threat to freedom the world has ever seen – well, he went to virtually unknown Eureka college. Barack Obama’s self-professed idol, Abraham Lincoln, had about 18 months of formal schooling in his entire life. The greatest communicator of American values did not finish high school.

Or look at the Founders; men we revere for having set this nation on its course to unprecedented prosperity and freedom: Sam Adams was a brewer. Paul Revere was a silversmith, a man who made things with his hands. Franklin was a printer, his fingers black with ink. Washington and Jefferson were planters… farmers, basically. Thomas Paine, whose brilliant prose turned the tide of public opinion in favor of the American Revolution, had no schooling whatsoever. He became an apprentice corset maker at age 13.

There is a plank in the eye of the elitist. I know, I used to be one of them. Looking back on those days, I marvel at how certain I was about things I knew nothing about. I wince – I cringe – when I recall how dismissive I was of common people, the people you see at Wal-mart, say. Like so many of the elitists I see today, I wore a sense of intellectual superiority to make up for a profound sense of loneliness, failure, insecurity and lack of life experience.

It’s okay. I got over it. I got over it by listening to the wisdom and the goodness and the strength of self-identified “common people,” and discovered that not oneof them did not have some uncommon trait or understanding. I realize now, as I did not then, that every single person I meet knows more about  hundreds if not thousands of things than I do. So I changed. I became a Daywalker. Now my mission is to go out and turn other elitist vampires and send them back toward the light.

Which brings us back to Scott Brown. He joked about his daughters being single. He joked about his truck. He said our money is better spent killing terrorists than defending them in court to cheers and thunderous applause and chants of U-S-A! U-S-A! … and this happened not in Texas but in Massachusetts! He is in touch with the common sense certainty that we are at war and not with the Ivory towered position of the President who thinks that we are not.

And parenthetically, how it galls these elitist so-called progressives that these two people who they so despise are so sexy and attractive and confident and at home in their own skins, as I have come to be once I realized that there is nothing particularly special about me other than my membership in the most awesome extended family this species has produced. Just an American citizen.

So, Scott – can I call you Scott? Doesn’t seem like you’re kind of guy who insists on being called Senator after all the hard work you put in getting there… Scott, I hear your truck has 200,000 miles on it. You’ve worked hard. If you want to buy a new truck to celebrate your win, I say go for it.

But when the day comes – and if you stay in Washington long enough then the day will come – when you decide that rather than driving yourself somewhere in your truck a man of your position deserves a chauffeured limo ride or an excursion in a private jet – then Scott, you won’t be Scott anymore. You’ll be Senator Brown. And when that day comes, Senator, you won’t be one of us anymore. You’ll be one of them. When that day comes, Senator, we’ll thank you for your service, because then it will be time to come home.

Hat tip to Michael Moore for reminding me about President Eisenhower’s famous “Beware the Military-Industrial Complex” speech, in which the Liberal Icon and Pacifist Saint Dwight David Eisenhower had this to say:

“…the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

(Emphasis mine – BW)

I wonder if this admonition from Eisenhower – uttered a few moments after he warned of the influence of the Military-Industrial complex — will be repeated among the Left with the same grave sense of somber warning as his previous few sentences?

UPDATE: Since it’s my blog…

I read a comment on the original post that I thought deserved a brief response. Long time readers know I am incapable of a brief anything.  I actually thought it raised enough interesting points to not have it buried in the comments.

So here’s the original  comment, and my response below:

From PHILLIP:

It seems, for all your criticism of liberals, you’ve only shown your anti-science and intellectual biases.

“a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity”

This is talking about the risks inherent in pure science vs. Applied science, not so much just federal money. Pure science is studying something for it’s own sake (ie, Newton’s studying gravity as a curiosity). Federal funds, particularly in military research, sometimes grasp at the basic pure science questions, but always have the bent towards a practical application. This is what restricts curiosity. It could be said of privately funded R&D, particularly when business fund university research. The novel “Arrowsmith” by Sinclair Lewis captures this quite well in it’s character Max Gottlieb.

“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money”

This is goes back to the issue of funding. Grants are necessary to fund research. Industrial and military grants limit research potential because there is almost always an expectation of certain results, be they practical technologies or monetary gain.

The federal government could give money to answer the basic questions without immediate practical gain, but often as not Congress representatives will protest this, but have no problem backing pork projects in military or highway funding.

“danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.””

Let’s first recall Eisenhower says science should be respected, which the right has often not respected.

Unlike people in business or politics, there is a lot more self reflection by academics of their role in society. Putting aside the social scientists who often try to force there way in, academic scientist usually have the least interest in influencing the whole of society. Note the novelty when Rep. Bill Foster, a particle physicist, replaced Dennis Hastert in Congress.

They’ll often be content in doing their research and presenting the evidence as is. They’ll try to apply their findings to solve societies problems, but often the offices they seek are still within academia and out of the public spotlight or directly involved in public policy.

The scientifc-technological elite is important. This means defense contractors. They have a direct interest in government funding of their projects, but the cost is several times higher than would be pure research, and often benefits from there being more conflict, war, and instability.

Note the F-22 that Obama cut out of the budget. It was a plane for a war long since over, of little use against terrorism, and severely overbudget and over-inflating the pockets of private interest. Yet the businesses that made the plane or it’s parts, and the Congressmembers who received donations or had parts of the plane made in their districts, fought to keep it. This is the influence that Eisenhower is warning us of.

It’s not an EPA scientist measuring pollution or the university physics professor probing the workings of sub atomic particles, or the climate scientists warning us about warming or the biologist writing of evolution. it’s those who try to wield science in a way to put a strangle on our government, it’s polices and its budget of private gain.

 

 

Phillip:

I am critically short on time today but I feel that your reasoned answer (well, most of it is reasoned) deserves a response.

It’s a shame you have to lead with the unreasonable — and arrogant — assumption: “..Your anti-science and intellectual biases…” I have been a research assistant for many years. I began teaching Astronomy at the Miami Space Transit Planetarium at age 15. I have been an astronomy research assistant at the University of Florida and I spent several years as a lab technician at Beta Analytic, which is the world’s preeminent Carbon 14 lab. I have spent most of my life using what intellectual powers I possess making science understandable to the layman.

I don’t need to be lectured about anti-science bias. I know what science is, and what it is not. And what is coming out of East Anglia is the PRECISE OPPOSITE of science. When I learned, only through “Climategate,” that the internal algorithms of the computer models were not open to everyone you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Furthermore, you will note that I have not denied that AGW is real, or that it is serious. But the POLITICAL intersection of science has ruined the scientific method — which is a way of thinking — at least at that installation. You don’t think that’s important? I think it is CRITICAL. You cannot wield the sword of science as a politician. POLICY is separate from THEORY, RESULTS and DATA. When scientists become involved in policy decisions, you get Climategate. And you DESERVE Climategate.

Your first point about pure science versus applied science is interesting. If I have a large set of contrary data, and I am doing pure science to try to understand the cause, I do not throw that data away and try to fire publishers that agree with it. If the contrary data points are outliers I can prove that statistically. If not, then I need to modify or scrap the theory. One compelling set of repeatable data can –AND SHOULD — destroy a theory. There is nothing pure science about AGW research.

Furthermore, I utterly reject your assertion that “one kind of science” is susceptible to budgetary pressures while the other kind is not. There is only one kind of scientist, and that is the human kind. All humans make mistakes. Science, when it is allowed to work, corrects most of those mistakes. When scientists know they are right and disregard conflicting views in the manner we have seen, that is not science. That is politics.

You go on to say that “Industrial and military grants limit research potential because there is almost always an expectation of certain results.” That may or may not be true depending on the individual case, but the ENTIRE POINT of the post is to point out that “the expectation of results” is PRECISELY the effect we have seen in East Anglia CRU, and if it is there, (and given the hugely politicized nature of the other climate research centers and their directors) then it is not unfair to assume that the anti-scientific protocols seen at EACRU are present elsewhere. Given the magnitude of the change AGW proponents want to create, and given shocking anti-science activities at one of the leading AGW centers, I would say fair-minded people believe the burden is on you.

You say that “Let’s first recall Eisenhower says science should be respected, which the right has often not respected.” CATEGORICALY TRUE. It’s shameful. That doesn’t impact this argument, but it is a point well taken.

However, when you write “Unlike people in business or politics, there is a lot more self reflection by academics of their role in society” it makes me wonder: have you read what is going on at CRU? Do you not realize how completely and transparently you reveal the bias you have? Scientists certainly DO NOT spend more time on self-reflection than people in politics and business. This assertion on your part goes straight to the heart of why you cannot make your point with just the data. Self-reflection would seem to indicate that there is a problem with the data sets. CRU chose to bury that problem. A SELF-REFLECTIVE person might see that this was a problem. I am NOT saying that the conflict in data means AGW is not happening. I AM saying that a real scientists would have to modify a theory to include contrary data, rather than congratulate themselves on how self-reflective (and therefore correct)they are IN SPITE of contrary data.

Now on to defense contractors. How many do you know? Personally, I mean. How many defense workers do you have drinks and dinner with? For me, it’s quite a few. Because when you say that they have a vested interest in “there being more conflict, war, and instability,” you have shown me you have not the slightest idea what or whom you are speaking of. Yet to make such a statement goes straight to the arrogance and narcissism that got us Climategate.

Defense Contractors have dedicated their lives to making the weapons that keep a society free and safe enough so that science and poetry may thrive. GOT THAT? That’s what they do. They — unlike you — have studied history and conflict, and they — unlike you — have had enough experience out in the real world beyond the bubble of freedom and security that you have spent your life in to know that bad things and bad people are out there trying to get in. They don’t need to be slandered by the likes of you, no matter how subsconciously you do it.

Furthermore, you specific criticism of the F-22 as “a plane for a war long since over, of little use against terrorism,” shows a remarkably poor understanding of the modern battlespace and furthermore carries the same short-sighted arrogance common in scientists: namely, the idea that they way things are now, politically, is the way things will always be. If China, or even Vladimir Putin decides to do something, on his own and for his own demented reasons, then we are left with a choice between A.) fleet of F-22’s or B.) your assurances that those wars are long over. I’ll take A.) I’m not arrogant enough to say what type of wars will never be fought again.

Scientists are good at detecting patterns. Detecting a pattern here, are we Phillip?

[I have just returned from five days at Guantanamo Bay. I was expecting to be blown away at the quality of the people I would meet there, but I was not prepared for how far they went beyond my high initial expectations. I'll have a Veteran's Day Afterburner about the experience by Wednesday morning. Until then, please conside this a small token of my undying respect and admiration for our retired and active duty military personnel. They are beyond my ability to describe. But I will try.

This was the first thing I ever posted online. It originally appeared through the kindness of Steven Den Beste at USS Clueless. Steven was writing about the American military, and I wrote this to him as soon as I returned from my father's funeral at Arlington. I'm very grateful to Steven for having published it in its entirety (and his subsequent support of Eject! Eject! Eject!),  because this small essay, and the response it received from you fine people, is what got me writing.

Thanks, Steven -- you are missed. And thanks especially to all of you for the support and encouragement. I never knew life could be this good, and I owe that to all of you. -- BW] 

On October 7th, 2002 I returned to Los Angeles from Arlington National Cemetery where we interred my father, 2nd Lt. William Joseph Whittle, who died from what may have been sheer joy during a fishing trip in Canada.

My dad served in the US Army in Germany, from 1944 through 1946. He was an intelligence officer, and was responsible for recording the time of death of the convicted War Criminals at Nuremburg after the war. He saw them hanged — he stood there with a stopwatch. He was 21 years old.

My father spent two years in the U.S. Military. He spent a lifetime in the corporate world. After twenty years as a world-class hotel manager, turning entire properties from liabilities into assets, he was let go without so much as a thank-you dinner or a handshake. Twenty years of service. He was a four-star general in the corporate world for two decades, and that was his reward.

Monday afternoon, at 1 pm, I stood underneath the McClellan arch at ANC. There were 13 family members there. There were also 40 men in uniform. I was stunned.

They took my dad’s ashes, in what looked like a really nice cigar box (what a little box for such a big man, I thought at that moment), and placed it in what looked like a metallic coffin on the back of a horse drawn caisson. His ashes were handled by other twenty-one year old men, men whose fathers were children when my dad was in uniform. Everything was inspected, checked, and handled with awesome, palpable, radiating reverence and respect.

As we walked behind the caisson, the band played not a dirge, but a march…a tune that left me searching for the right adjective, which I didn’t find until the flight home. It was TRIUMPHAL. It was the sound you make when you bring a hero home. It was the only time during the service that I really began to cry.

My father received a military funeral: the folded flag, the 21 gun salute, the honor guard, and a Chaplain named Crisp who declared a grateful nation was welcoming their brother William home to rest among heroes.

My dad served for two years. He wrote on the back of his Army officer class graduation photo that he expected to die fighting for his country within a few months. Most everybody who signed his photo wrote the same thing.

The chaplain said, looking my stepmom in the eyes like this was the first time he’d ever said the words, that the men and women buried here had agreed to lay down their lives for their country and each other, and that THIS, not rank, or social status, or length in service, is what entitled them to be buried in America’s most sacred ground.

Before the ceremony, I was looking at the headstones, and it’s sad how each area of Arlington is like a forlorn vintage: here are buried the veterans who died around 1995, there is the 1982 vintage, the mid-fifties crop over on yonder hill. And standing between a Major and a Lt. Colonel, I saw a headstone for a PFC who was born in 1979, the year I entered college, and who had died in 1998. This young man, not even twenty, couldn’t have been in the service for more than a few months, and yet there he lay, with the same headstone as colonels and majors and the many, many sergeants that cover those fields.

That is American honor, and no where else in the world does it exist in such a naked, magnificent form. Each of these men and women, this band of brothers, receiving the same heartfelt respect. For my father, who died at age 77, it was the honoring of a contract he had signed more than half a century before, defending Europe and helping bring those criminal bastards to justice. It was a contract paid in full, one that has given my family and me an indescribable sense of comfort and pride.

As we were leaving, it dawned on me that the ugly brown-grey building I had been looking at across the road looked suddenly familiar. I asked the funeral coordinator if that was, in fact, the Pentagon, and he replied that it was…indeed, it was the side that the aircraft struck.

On September 11, 2001, this man was about to conduct a morning service on a hill about 1/2 mile from that brown-grey wall. He heard a roar and a whine, saw a silver blur fifty feet above his head, and watched as a 757 immolated itself against the side of the Pentagon. It was my unpleasant duty to inform him that a book claiming that the plane crash never happened, but was rather an intelligence service plot, had become one of the best-selling books in France, the country my father and millions of other American’s were willing to die for in order to liberate as young men.

My mother remains, to this day, a proud British Subject, the daughter of a man Awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1954 for his service in the Royal Marines. She, my grandfather and uncle were nearly murdered by Egyptian mobs during the Suez crisis, and she is fiercely proud of both of her native country and the one she married into. Yet she said that nowhere in the world do ordinary servicemen or women receive anything like this level of honor and respect and reverence, and she is right. All nations honor their generals and heroes. This nation honors privates and sergeants in indistinguishable fashion.

Walking behind the flag-draped caisson of an Army 2nd Lieutenant that day, I felt that my father was receiving the funeral of the President of the United States. And, number of people on the parade route aside, as a matter of fact, he was.

FREEDOM is the second essay in SILENT AMERICA. It started out as a series of comments in Rachel Lucas’s blog (which for some reason I cannot seem to link to, but it’s www.rachellucas.com) on the subject of gun ownership.  Rachel mentioned she had a friend who wanted to buy a gun, and asked if anyone could help her make the case.

The honest truth is I had never given the matter any thought at all. My dad was a hunter and 2nd Lt. in the U.S. Army, so we always had guns in the house and I was taught how to respect them from the day I was born. But I had never owned a gun, and only fired a real one on two or three occasions when visiting my dad as a teen and young man.

However,  I remember very, very clearly watching a store clerk pull down two Daisy Winchester BB guns — one for me and one for my brother — and as he did, I can still hear my father telling us what would happen to us if we EVER pointed it at another person, car or house. I don’t remember all the details exactly but it involved a lot more than the worst thing we thought he could do at the time; namely, take the BB guns away.

Anyway, I started thinking about it, and wrote three or four long replies in Rachel’s comments section.  She thought they were good enough to combine and publish on her front page, and the response was so overwhelming that she personally created Eject! for me out of thin air — did all of the set-up and got it hosted and everything, for which I am eternally grateful and without which I would not be here.

Many long-time readers think this was the first impression I made on the web, back in late 2003. Actually, the reason this is the second essay is because about a month earlier, I had returned to LA from attanding my father’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, and I was (and remain) a huge fan of Steven Den Beste and his USS Clueless blog. Steven had posted an article on the nature of American armies versus Arab ones, and I wrote him to tell him of my experience at Arlington. He posted the letter in full, and that, with very minor modifications, became the first essay in the Silent America book: HONOR, which I will re-post here next week.

Anyway, that’s the story. Here’s FREEDOM]

When I was a little kid, I asked my dad about an image I had seen of really huge numbers of prisoners being marched to their execution in a forest clearing, guarded by perhaps five or ten men with rifles. I wanted to know why they didn’t just rush the guards? I mean, it’s one thing if they were heading to another crappy day at work camp, but these people were being led off to be killed. I mean, for God’s sake, what did they have to lose?

I was six. My dad looked at me. He had served in the latter days of WW2 in Europe as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. No parachuting onto the decks of enemy U-Boats at night to steal Enigma machines — just newly-minted, 2nd Lieutenant grunt work. He’d been to the camps though, seen some horrible things. When I asked him why they didn’t fight back or run for the woods, he said, without any arrogance or contempt or jingoism, “I don’t know Billy, I can’t figure that one out myself.” Then there was a long moment. “But I can’t imagine Americans just walking off like that, either.”

Now before the combined military might of the European Union responds with a very harshly worded letter, let me clarify something: When he said he couldn’t imagine Americans marching off to their deaths, he meant, obviously, Americans like the ones he knew. Kids who grew up hunting, kids who got a BB gun for their fifth birthday (never Christmas though — you could shoot your eye out!)

I don’t believe for an instant in any genetic nonsense about slave races or nations of pure-bred heroes. That’s a deadly trap, and the end result of such thinking is a place on the watchtower machine-gunning starving prisoners. But humans are the most successful species this planet has seen not for being ferocious or fast or strong or even intelligent, but for their malleability. Humans can, and do, adapt to anything. It is their culture that determines what is in their hearts.

Consider the case of Jews in Germany, during the 1930’s:

Here was a people who had been so tormented and prosecuted and psychologically beaten down that they came to believe the outrageous slander that they were guests in their own county. Behind their shuttered doors at night, they created cocoons of astonishing culture and beauty, a symphony of violins and cellos and poetry and literature. They were far over-represented in occupations we rightly esteem as among the most noble of our species: surgeons, musicians, teachers and scientists.

By any measure of human decency, these were the people that should have been helping to lead a ravaged Germany back to respect and prosperity. Yet they were massacred in their millions by brutes and sadists who could barely write their own names.

If it is possible to write a clearer lesson on human nature, then I cannot imagine it, nor can I imagine the amount of blood it will take to convince people unwilling to look reality in the face; that reality being that compassion, culture, law and philosophy are precious, rare and acquired habits that must be defended with force against people who understand nothing but force. The great failure and staggering tragedy of European Jews is that they could not accept that some of their neighbors were not as decent, humane and educated as they were. A culture that learned to survive by turning inward simply never was willing to face the reality of what they were up against; namely, that hoping for compassion and humanity from the likes of the Nazis was akin to reading poetry to a hurricane. This denial — and that is the only word for it — is, in the final horrible analysis, a form of unconscious arrogance, a refusal to see things for what they are. A people of astonishing internal beauty simply could not look into the face of such ugliness without turning away. And now they are dead.

And there are many intelligent, enlightened, gentle and good-hearted people today who believe exactly the same thing. If we let this moral blindness continue to gain ground, then they will get us all killed, too. And then who will put their boot on humanity’s neck for the next thousand years?

I recently visited a website that featured a picture of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, with the caption: My hero! Someone who thinks his way out of trouble! The implication, of course, is that force and violence are universally to be rejected and despised as unworthy of thinking people (or Vulcans).

Well bucko, Spock carried a phaser as well as a tricorder, and he used it when he had to. If the Star Trek future represents a hope for our species at its most reasonable and open-minded best, it would be well to remember that the Enterprise carries a hell of a lot of photon torpedoes because the cause of human decency cannot be advanced if all the decent humans lie dead.

Freedom is preserved by free people. Our 40th President wrote that “no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”

Free people know in their heart that they are free. Back again for a moment to a culturally rich, bathed in literature and opera, non-simplisme culture like 1940s Germany: I also asked my father what would happen if the Gestapo came for us one night. He said he couldn’t stop them from taking us, but he could damn sure take a few of those bastards with them, and I decided right there that I’d do the same thing.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulags, in countless other miserable terrifying pits of murder, some people woke up to the idea that resistance is NOT futile. Which is why that old saw, which in my terribly, tragically misspent liberal youth I used to sneer at as the mark of a real idiot – “they can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers” – suddenly makes a new kind of sense to me.

That is not the statement of someone who doesn’t want to give up a snowmobile or a Beemer. That is a statement that draws a line in the sand for the government, or any other oppressor, to plainly see. You want to take this freedom away from me? COME AND GET IT.

I believe gun ownership is the truest form of freedom, and here’s why: It says you are your own person, responsible for your own actions. You are not willing to be collectively punished for the misdeeds of others. In fact, those that abuse this freedom by committing crimes are thought of and dealt with much more harshly by gun owners, as a rule, than Hollywood celebrities, precisely because a free person understands the responsibility that comes with freedom.

To the many thoughtful and intelligent Europeans and Canadians who scorn the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution as the dangerous plaything of illiterate, mindless oafs who enjoy loud noises, let me simply refer you to that great unbiased and incorruptible teacher: History.

Ask yourselves why intellectual elites so love totalitarian states where people are unarmed and dependant sheep. Look at the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Saddam, and the horrors they have inflicted at will on their own people. And when contemplating your ever-so-sophisticated foreign policy, ask yourselves what real options you are left with when facing a determined, heartless bastard like Hitler, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan or Attila.

Maybe the time for real evil like that has finally gone. I hope you are right, I really do. I don’t want to go fight those bastards; I’d rather barbeque and watch the Gators. I’m sure the Jews in 1930 Germany thought such things could never happen again, not in the heart of European culture and civilization. I’m sure every bound and beaten musician, surgeon, philosopher and painter being lined up at the side of a ditch thought exactly that.

Try and understand this about Americans like myself and others who can look such horrors in the eye: We are not going out like that. Get it? We’ll put up with handgun murders if we have to, but we are not going down that road. As a general rule, we are quiet, peaceful, decent people with better things to do than referee endless bloodbaths abroad. But it is possible to get our attention. And believe me, you have it now, and I believe the time will come when you will regret calling us cowboys and Nazis and idiots, because the day may come when you once again need the help of a free and determined people, fighting forces you ignore not from superior sophistication but from sheer moral cowardice.

Great Britain, the philosophical home and mother to this nation, has responded to a horrible shooting tragedy by essentially disarming their entire population. That is their decision alone to make, and history will record whether it was a wise one or not. But consider this:

A Marine Corps officer wondered to himself whether such an order would be carried out in the United States. He was surprised to see that most of his men would not follow an order to disarm the populace by force.

This, to my mind, is the fundamental difference between the Europeans and the U.S.: We trust the people. We fought wars and lost untold husbands and brothers and sons because of this single most basic belief: Trust the people. Trust them with freedom. Trust them to spend their own money. Trust them to do the right thing. Trust them to defend themselves. To the degree that government can help, great – but TRUST THE PEOPLE.

It would take an army — not an army of celebrities or trial lawyers, an actual SHOOTING ARMY — to forcibly disarm this nation. Who will do the dirty work? Volunteer citizen soldiers, that’s who – and the first guns they’d have to turn in would be their own.

See, we don’t have shock troops here, boyo. No Republican Guards, Special or otherwise; no Hussars, no Cossacks, no SS; we lack Praetorian elites, Napoleonic bodyguard units – any of that ideologically inculcated poison. Just kids serving their country, making some money for college. You think those people would fire on a crowd of American citizens fighting to preserve the Constitution, when they themselves have taken the same oath? Think again.

Unlike the those poor, unarmed, psychologically battered Jews, Poles, homosexuals and uncounted other souls lost in the mid 1940s, NO ONE is pulling ANY kids out of this crowd’s house at night and going home fully staffed, ready to try again tomorrow. Understand? THAT is the point.

Here is a sociological experiment that might have something to teach us:

Kick down100 doors of self-proclaimed French pacifists, grab the women and kids, and haul them away. Then try again in Texas, with 100 NRA members. Collate, or rather, have a surviving relative collate the results. Extrapolate the abductors’ rates of casualties to determine the total number of murdering swine needed. See what percentage of jackbooted thugs have a suicide wish and then determine the number of men you will need to disarm, kidnap and murder 50 million armed people.

You will need a lot of men. More than you can raise.

These trust the people freedoms are so deeply engrained in the fabric of America as to be almost hereditary, I think. I used to worry that we’d bred that out of us, and then along comes Todd Beamer and company on United Flight 93, who, first among us that day, realized they were being marched to their deaths and decided to do something about it. Not for themselves, because by taking that action they knew they were doomed. They did it for us. Not only to save the lives of those on the ground for whom their aircraft was headed, but to remind us of who we are as a people, to add to the list of ordinary Americans who can gather extraordinary courage and resolve because they have been trusted all their lives by their government and their fellow citizens.

We are a nation of unruly immigrants, self-selecting people who placed bold action above endless suffering, sold what little they had and bought passage to take a chance on a place they had never seen except in their quiet hopes, a land our 40th President, Ronald Reagan, described as “a beacon, a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.” Intellectuals have called Ronald Reagan an idiot, but that is to be expected from people incapable of being moved by anything other than the sound of their own bitter and small voices in a world too full of hope for them to grasp.

We are, and remain, the descendents of people who had had quite enough of being told what to do by inbred aristocratic fops and unelected, intellectual sadists. When Europeans call us simplisme, they show themselves incapable of recognizing the difference between intelligence, of which we are amply endowed, and intellectualism, that circle-jerk of coffee table revolution and basement politburo planning that we have never had much patience with.

To those who doubt our mental sophistication, I would remind you that our grandparents walked upon the moon. And why is it that of all we produce and all we exult, the only things that seem to have caught on in Europe are McDonald’s and Baywatch? That says much more about them than it does about us, and none of it good, I’m afraid.

We as a nation suffer an appalling number of handgun-related deaths each year — perhaps 11,000 of them. The number is not important; each is a personal tragedy and those lives can never be replaced.

If we attempt to reduce this horrible number by banning handguns, we are taking away the property of a person who has broken no laws by a government whose legitimacy is determined by a document that specifically allows that property, namely guns.

Destroy that trust by punishing the innocent, by pulling a plank from the Bill of Rights, and the contract between the government and the people falls apart. Once the Second Amendment goes, the First will soon follow, because if some unelected elite determines that the people can’t be trusted with dangerous guns then it’s just a matter of time until they decide they can’t be trusted with dangerous ideas, either. Dangerous ideas have killed many millions more people than dangerous handguns – listen to the voices from the Gulag, the death camps, and all the blood-soaked killing fields through history.

The Framers, in their wisdom, put the 2nd Amendment there to give teeth to the revolutionary, unheard-of idea that the power rests with We The People. They did not depend on good will or promises. They made sure that when push came to shove we’d be the ones doing the pushing and shoving, not the folks in Washington. And by the way, gun rights supporters are frequently mocked when they say it deters foreign invasion – after all, come on, grow up, be realistic: Who’s nuts enough to invade America? Exactly. It’s unthinkable. Good. 2nd Amendment Mission 1 accomplished.

But back to the undeniable domestic cost: When confronted with the idea of banning handguns to reduce this horrible toll, many handgun defenders are tempted to point to the numbers killed on the highways each year — perhaps four times that number — and ask why we don’t ban cars as well.

The logical response is that bans on travel – cars, airplanes, etc. – are a false analogy compared to banning guns because cars have a clear benefit while guns don’t do anything other than kill what they are aimed at.

While that is exactly true, I think it misses the point, which to me is simply this: We’d never ban car travel to avoid thousands of highway deaths. It’s clearly not worth it in both economic and personal freedom terms. We chose, reluctantly, and with many a lost loved one in mind, to keep on driving.

Here is my dry-eyed, cold-hearted, sad conclusion: I believe that the freedom, convenience and economic viability provided by the automobile is worth the 40,000 lives we lose to automotive deaths each year — a number made more horrible by the fact that perhaps 40% are related to drunk driving and therefore preventable.

By the same calculation, I accept that the freedoms entrusted to the people of the United States is worth the 11,000 lives we lose to gun violence each year.

I wish I could make both those numbers go away. I will support any reasonable campaign to make them as low as possible.

But understand this: 11,000 handgun deaths a year, over four years is very roughly 50,000 killed. In Nazi Germany, an unarmed population was unable to resist the abduction and murder of 6,000,000 people in a similar period: a number 120 times higher. Throw in the midnight murders of the Soviets, the Chinese, the various and sundry African and South American genocides and purges and political assassinations and that number grows to many hundreds, if not several thousand times more killings in unarmed populations.

Visualize this to fully appreciate the point. Imagine the Superbowl. Every player on the field is a handgun victim. All the people in the stands are the victims who were unable to resist with handguns. Those are historical facts.

I, myself, am willing to pay that price as a society – knowing full well that I or a loved one may be part of that terrible invoice. I wish it was lower. Obviously, I wish it didn’t exist at all. But any rational look into the world shows us places where the numbers of innocents murdered by their own governments in unarmed nations are far, far higher.

Of course, many societies have far lower numbers. Japan is a fine example. I’m sure if the United States had 2000 years of a culture whose prize assets are conformity and submission then our numbers would be a lot lower. Alas, we are not that society. Thank God, we are not that society.

It is abundantly clear that the rate of handgun murders in the United States is not uniform. Very large murder rates can be observed in small, exceedingly violent populations of every race in this country, and these rates seem to be more related to issues of income, education and living conditions. Certainly guns are freely available in areas where our murder rates are appallingly high. They are also found in very large numbers in communities where handgun crime is virtually nonexistent.

Doesn’t that tell us that there something deeper at work here? Could it be, perhaps, that the problem is not with the number of guns in this country but rather in the hearts of those who we allow to wield them, repeatedly? Could it really be as simple as apprehending, and punishing, those that would do harm to innocents and to civilization? Rather than banning guns, should we not attack the moral rot that infests these small, violent populations of every color who put such horrible numbers at our feet?

Assume for a moment you could vaporize every gun on the planet. Would crime go away? Or would ruthless, physically strong gangs of young men be essentially able to roam free and predate at will?

The history of civilization shows time and time again how decent, sophisticated city dwellers amass wealth through cooperation and the division of labor – only to be victimized by ruthless gangs of raping, looting cutthroats who couldn’t make a fruit basket, sweeping down on them, murdering them and carting away the loot, to return a few years later, forever, ad infinitum. Vikings, Mongols, desperadoes of every stripe – they are a cancer on humanity but there they are and there they have always been.

If civilization is worth having (and I believe it is) then it has to be defended, because the restraining virtues of justice, compassion and respect for laws are products of that civilizing force and completely unknown to those who would do it harm.

Therefore, since I believe in this civilization, in its laws, science, art and medicine, I believe we must be prepared to defend it against what I feel no embarrassment for calling the Forces of Darkness. Those forces could be raiders on horseback, jackbooted Nazi murderers, faceless KGB torturers or some kid blowing away a shopkeeper.

For the gun-ban argument to be convincing, you’d have to show me a time before shopkeepers were blown away, hacked away, pelted away or whatever the case may be. You would have to show me a time in history before the invention of the firearm, when crime and raiding and looting did not exist, when murders and rapes did not exist. We may lose 11,000 people to handguns a year. How many would we lose without any handguns, if murderers and rapists roamed free of fear, ignoring reprisal from citizens or police? I don’t know. You don’t know either. Maybe it’s a lot fewer people, and maybe, in a world where strength and ruthlessness trump all, it would be a far higher one.

You may argue that only the police should be allowed to carry guns. Consider this carefully. Do we really want to create an unelected subculture that views itself as so elite and virtuous as to be the only ones worthy of such power, trust and authority? Have we not clearly seen the type of people drawn to such exclusive positions of authority, and the attitudes and arrogance it promotes?

Furthermore, I can’t see any moral distinction between a policeman and a law-abiding citizen. Policemen are drawn from the ranks of law-abiding citizens. They are not bred in hydroponics tanks. They are expected to show restraint and use their weapon as a last resort. Millions upon millions of citizens, a crowd more vast than entire armies of police, do exactly this every day.

If all of these horrors had sprung up as a result of the invention of the handgun I’d be right there beside those calling for their destruction.

But clearly, this is not the case. In our cowboy past we used to say that “God created Man, but Sam Colt made them equal.” This is simple enough to understand. It means that a villager, let’s say a schoolteacher, can defeat a human predator who may have spent his entire life practicing the art of war. Firearms are what tipped the balance toward civilization by eliminating a lifetime spent studying swordplay or spear play or pointed-stick play. The bad guys have always used weapons and they always will. The simple truth about guns is that they are damn effective and even easier to operate. They level the playing field to the point where a woman has a chance against a gang of thugs or a police officer can control a brawl.

I don’t see how vaporizing all the guns in the world would remove crime or violence – history shows these have always been with us and show no signs of responding favorably to well-reasoned arguments or harsh language. I wish it were not true. I wish the IRS did not exist either, but there it is.

Criminals, and criminal regimes ranging from The Brow-Ridged Hairy People That Live Among the Distant Mountains all the way through history to the Nazis and the Soviets, have and will conspire to take by force what they cannot produce on their own. These people must be stopped. The genius of the 2nd Amendment is that it realizes that these people could be anybody – including the U.S. Army. That is why this power, like the other powers, is vested in the people. Nowhere else in the world is this the case. You can make a solid argument that the United States is, by almost any measure, the most prosperous, successful nation in history. I’m not claiming this is because every American sleeps with a gun under the pillow – the vast majority do not. I do claim it is the result of a document that puts faith and trust in the people – trusts them with government, with freedom, and with the means of self-defense. You cannot remove that lynchpin of trust without collapsing the entire structure. Many observers of America never fully understand what we believe in our bones, namely, that the government doesn’t tell us what we can do – WE tell THOSE bastards just how far they can go.

Of course, all of this is completely whimsical, because, like nuclear weapons, guns are HERE and they are not going to go away. You cannot just vaporize them. Honest people might be compelled to turn in their weapons; criminals clearly will not. So what do you propose? Forget the moral high ground of gun ownership. Again a simple truth, often maligned but demonstrably dead-on accurate: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

The American Revolution surely is unique in the sense that the ringleaders – Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, etc – were men of property, wealth and prestige; in other words, men with something to lose. Compare this to any other revolution in history, where the ringleaders were outsiders; plotters staring in the windows of prosperity, powerless. The Russian Revolution, French Revolution, etc – these were joined by desperate people fighting mind-numbing poverty and severe political repression.

And yet the Founding Fathers were men who were as well-off as any men on earth at the time, and furthermore, any of them could have been (and were) political leaders under His Majesty’s government. The average colonial farmer likewise led a life far more comfortable than those of his cousins in Europe, to say nothing of Asia or Africa.

For all practical intents and purposes, these people had absolutely nothing to gain, and everything in the world to lose, by taking on the greatest military force the world had ever known. Why would they do this? What possible motivation could, well-off, comfortable people have? Militarily, they seemed certain to lose, and they knew before they started – and Patrick Henry made the point crystal clear – that they would be hanged as common criminals if they failed.

Of course, the answer is, they did it to be free. And they did it to make the rest of their nation – the poor, the disenfranchised – free as well. And it is clear as crystal from their collective writings that they took that risk to make Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore and the rest of us in their unseen posterity free, too. They could look down the dim, moonlit riverbanks of the future and see a society worthy of their sacrifice and determination. They knew that God, (or for me, chance perhaps) had put them together in a time and place where bold, courageous action followed by much suffering, doubt, blood and fear could, perhaps, unleash in mankind an energy source the likes of which they could not imagine.

So for me, a child of that bet – that guess, that commitment, that roll of the dice – for ME, I owe them the defense of that freedom, and I will do my poor mite to pass it on as best I can. These men pledged to each other their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor. They pledged that to ME. I owe them. I do not have the right to take away someone else’s freedom and property – it is offensive to me to even contemplate it. Of course, if someone breaks the freedom/responsibility covenant by committing a crime, then all bets are off. To that extent, I view handgun murderers not just as criminals but as traitors as well.

I hate seeing our kids get shot on the street, I hate it, I hate it. But that is the cost of freedom. People get horribly killed on Spring Break road trips to Florida at age 18. They’re driving drunk. We could prevent them from going. We would save lives. Enron and MCI steal like the worst characters from Dickens, taking people’s Christmas dinners so they can have gold plated faucets. We could regulate more, make things harder for the millions of honest businesses that build and trade honorably each day. The day may come when someone flies a Cessna into a stadium. We can ban the airplanes. Ditto for pleasure boats. We can ban and confiscate and regulate to our hearts content, and we will undoubtedly save many, many innocent lives by doing so. All for the price of a little freedom.

I believe we should punish the perpetrators. I will not agree to restrict the freedoms of the vast numbers of people who abide by the concomitant responsibility and live lives of honesty and decency.

And there is more than the physical restriction of freedoms: There is the slow erosion of self-reliance, self-confidence and self-determination among a nation. The more your government restricts your options, the more you psychologically look to government to keep you safe, fed, clothed, housed and sustained.

There is a word for people who are fed, clothed, housed and sustained fully by others, and that word is SLAVES.

If Congress were occupied by angels and Michael sat in a throne of glory in the Oval Office, I would listen to what they said for my own greater good. But no government is made of angels, not even the Canadian government in all its decency and compassion. So who determines how much freedom we trade for how much security? People do. People are not unknown to place their own interests above those of others. There is even a vanishing remote chance that Jean Cretien has at some point perhaps put personal interest above those of his constituents.

The real genius of the Founding Fathers was that these great and good men had the foresight and the courage to look into their own darker motives, and construct a system that prevents the accumulation of power.

The Constitution they created could only be torn up by force of arms. And that is why the Founders left that power in the hands of the people, who together can never be cowed by relatively small numbers of thugs holding the only guns.

As PJ O’Rourke points out, the U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner’s manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world’s most unruly, passionate people safe, prosperous and free. Smarter people than me may disagree with that document – I’m for not touching a comma.

So as a proud son of those brave men, I’ll take freedom – all of it – and because I accept the benefits of those freedoms, I’ll solemnly take the responsibilities as well. I may someday lose a child on a trip to Spring Break, but I’ll never lock them in the basement to keep them safe. And I’ll accept the fact that living in Los Angeles puts me at risk for being shot to death because I feel the freedom is worth it. I breathe that freedom every day, and hey, we all gotta go sometime. I’ll continue to fly experimental airplanes because I am careful, meticulous, precise and responsible, and yet the day may come when I am out of altitude, out of airspeed and out of ideas all at the same time. Oh well. I have seen and done things up there that you cannot imagine and I cannot describe. Freedom.

I respect and admire Canada. Although we have chosen certain diverging paths since the days of the Revolution, we have been, and always will be, the best of friends despite our differences. Canada is unquestionably as decent, modest and good a society as exists on Earth today. And yet while Canadians frequently point out that they are free of our vices, I perceive that they are free of our greatness as well. You can’t have it both ways.

Me, personally, I’ll take the spirit, ingenuity and passion that can plant the American flag on the moon over pre-paid health care. I can buy health care. Thirty three years after watching the event as a ten year old boy, I’m still trying to go to the moon. (Some of us in the Mojave desert may still have few tricks up our sleeve on this one. We’re still free to build airplanes and spacecraft from our garages and fly the goddamn things. Try and keep up with a nation that builds working spacecraft in the garage. As a hobby. Out of pocket. For FUN.)

And everyone who has taken America’s disdain for intellectualism as a lack of intelligence has woken up looking at our dust trail as we speed ever faster beyond them. We’re not just a smart country – we’re THE smart country. Behold the list of inventions and Nobel Prize winning scientists. Einstein was an American. Of course he emigrated here — we all did. Germany threw him away – he’s ours now, by his choice, not ours. Ditto Von Braun and numerous others, not to mention the legion of homegrown geniuses like the Wright Brothers and Robert Goddard, just to draw two names from the narrow field I know best. Staggeringly brilliant men and women, the best, most active minds on the planet pulling for the same team.

Canada is free of many of the foreign policy disasters and failures of vision that the United States has been correctly charged with, but they are free too of the satisfaction and pride of being history’s singular bulwark of freedom and prosperity, and the eternal, unintimidated scourge of tyrants and murderers from the Barbary pirates, through the armed might of the 20th Century’s parade of totalitarians and right up to Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and the criminal lunatics that run North Korea.

Our failures and disgraces cruelly remind us that we, like every other government, are composed of fallible men and women with no divine ability to read the future or foresee all outcomes. But these failures are failures of action, action borne of confidence and a belief in our way of life, and come all the more painful for their contrast to the everyday standards to which we hold ourselves as a people and a nation. For it is an undeniable fact that no great nation in history has held a shadow of our measure of power, and yet exercised it with such restraint, nor does any time in the bloody history of warfare reflect a people so magnanimous in victory against enemies sworn to our murder and destruction. From our first hour, we have been, and remain, the beacon of hope and freedom for a world desperate and longing for such an example, and we can measure our success in building such a place by the numbers of those who are literally dying in an attempt to come and be part of it.

So take your pick: Freedom or security? Greatness or goodness? Passion or decency?

Our respective ancestors made their choice and here we are. I respect anyone’s right to chose differently. I only speak up to defend the choice we Americans made as a deeply spiritual one, borne of reflection and danger and a spectacular triumph against all odds. I cannot stand idly by to hear people denounce our freedoms as the dimwitted macho posturing of a mob of illiterate uncultured idiots who are so vulgar and uncouth as to still believe in Hollywood myths manufactured for our simple complacent unsophisticated nature.

From the Revolution until today, the choice for full freedom with all its accompanying excesses and failures is a profoundly well-reasoned, moral and ethical choice, and the result has been national and personal success unparalleled in the history of this world.

I am deeply proud to be a member of such a magnificent group of people. I hope to God I can give back as much as I owe.

Over at Teh Facebook, a reader named Rusty was kind enough to complement me on my historical background and wanted to know where I picked up some of the oldster mojo. I’m pretty much self-taught in history, but it struck me as an excellent question, and I thought I might repeat the answer here for those who might be interested.

One of my favorite history works is THE LAST 100 DAYS, by John Toland, about the final days of WWII. Just understanding what went on in the Hitler Bunker makes it impossible to put down.

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS is very good, but James Bradley’s follow-up, FLYBOYS, will make your blood run cold. I used that for a lot of my information on the Atomic Bomb video.

The best combat history I have read is Guy Sajer’s THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIER, which is the story of a French national fighting with the Germans on the Russian front in WWII. If you really want to know how bad things can be, that’s the one.

All of Victor Davis Hanson’s books are keepers. Nothing I can add to that.

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER is a great little volume on the Titanic, and LIFE IN MEDIEVAL TIMES by Marjorie Rowling is a little-known gem about the Middle Ages. PLAGUES AND PEOPLES by William McNeill takes alook at human history as a result of disease gradients ranging from the equator to the poles and the effect of disease immunity on human history.

A BRILLIANT SOLUTION is the story of the Constitutional convention — not a great read, but really informative.

And I flat out DEFY any reader to believe that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on JFK after finishing CASE CLOSED by Gerald Posner.

Second runner up in the sheer entertainmet field: BLACK HAWK DOWN – a brilliant movie and even better book. Mark Bowden became a hero to the military for telling that story. It’s probably the best description of modern warfare you’ll ever read.

However, the most entertaining history book I have ever encountered is the semi-fiction GATES OF FIRE by Steven Pressfield. He came into the studio for an interview with Glenn Reynolds and it might as well have been Bono as far as I was concerned…

All of these pale — really pale — to the single greatest piece of history ever written, in my mind: THE CIVIL WAR: A NARRATIVE  by the brilliant, the breath-takingly good Shelby Foote. Three volumes of about 800 pages each. I read it through, put it down for a year or two, then read it again. been through it four times now, and it never gets old.

I’d love to hear your own comments and suggestions, and the best way to reach me with questions would be to join the cool kids over at my facebook page by clicking on the link at the top of this post.

Most of the serious writing I do these days is for my AFTERBURNER editorials. I also co-host a show on PJTV called TRIFECTA. Steve Green from VodkaPundit,  Scott Ott at Scrappleface and I got the idea when we met for the first time while at CPAC in Washington at the beginning of the year. TRIFECTA lets us handle smaller stories and just generally goof on them for the most part.

Producing the show is a bit of a problem, since Scott and Steve do it via Webcam. The problem for our PJTV producers is in getting everybody’s visual elements in line and ready to go for Tuesday taping.  Scott hosts a segment, Steve hosts one and I host one, and we tape all three right after each other.  Our Executive Producer then decides which order to release them in, but they’ll all come out this week in one order or another.  So on Mondays we generally have a conference call to get our ducks in a line for the next day, and it occurred to me that some of you might be interested in seeing how we get prepped for these sequences.

Here’s my outline for the segment we’ll tape tomorrow. 

Hello boys and girls.

Nothing leaping up at me except BALLOON BOY.

I’d like to open with Scott’s headline at scrappleface: WORLD HAILS OBAMA’S RESCUE OF BALLOON BOY…

…because I think it’s just priceless.

Three topics interest me:

1. The human connection. When we thought there was a kid in that thing we all sat transfixed. When you look back on it with no kid, it’s just a piece of debris. A lot of people talk about how crappy humans are, but this is us at our best.

2. Us at our worst: looks like the whole thing was a fraud by a family that has been watching a little too much reality TV. Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montaug should be Time’s People of the Year. They encapsulate everything wrong with the Culture of Celebrity and apparently, this is why they scared the piss out of the entire world: to get famous. I think mom and dad can be famous from prison.

3, This incident immediately hammered home to me how ridiculous conspiracy theories are, and upon what flimsy evidence they are based. When you show me footage of a real UFO that has the same kind of crispness and detail that this fake UFO had, then I will believe in UFO’s. Instead, we are always asked to interpret a single frame of a distant blur with WHAT APPEARS TO BE A MISSILE POD ON AN AIRLINER! or some other rubbish.

Why are UFO pictures so blurry and the Balloon Boy pictures so detailed? BECAUSE BALLOONS ARE REAL.

Anyway, that’s where I’m going. Talk to you at noon.

B

…And decided to finally get with the program. I haven’t used The Facebook very much personally, but the raw power of it has finally been driven home to me and from now on I’ll be updating that page before I do anything.

There are a great many things that I do in the course of my work week that I feel would simply clutter up Eject! Eject! Eject!

However! On “the Facebook” I can update pretty much everything I do, which in a typical week includes interviews with CIA guys and other National Security types, TRIFECTA segments with my buddies Steve Green of VodkaPundit and Scott Ott of Scrappleface, various and sundry other PJTV elements, the AFTERBURNERS, of course, and small scraps of writing such as lunch instructions for the sandwich shop or other Indispensable Elements of the Bequest to Humanity that the teeming masses await with bated breath.

Seriously, though — it looks like a great way to get out the message and I’d be flattered and honored if you feel like signing up.

Now on to “The Twitter!” I understand that by “tweetering” I can send out small messages called “twits.” Anyone interested in receiving these infrequent “twits” – and this includes updates to the page on The Facebook – can follow me on Twitter as @BillWhittle. (And if you think I will be using that to let you know what kind of cat food I buy you will be sorely disappointed at the infrequency.)

Thanks to all. Next week: a re-post of FREEDOM from Silent America, and from now on I am going to post the AFTERBURNER scripts the day I record them, so you can tell all your friends and be the coolest kid on the block.

[Earlier today I got involved in a private, inter-office email war that I am often made privy to. It's a law firm, you see, and lawyers (like me) like to argue about things.  Generally it sharpens the mind, and this was no exception.

What got me into the fight was the overall idea that negotiation is always preferable to conflict and that the Patriot Act, specifically, was a horrible usurpation of our freedoms and produced no good result.

Here's a response. The name which I am responding specifically to has been changed to Mary.]

I have resisted the urge to comment on these epic battles (although they have been great reading) but I feel I must interject something here regarding the Patriot act and this pious belief that it was somehow evil and beneath us.

On Friday, I interviewed a life-long CIA case officer who has recently joined a flood of life-long intelligence officers who are resigning from the CIA. He resigned because the George Bush’s Global War on Terror has been changed to Barack Obama’s Global War on the CIA. When Eric Holder has been tasked with prosecuting the people who have kept this country and its citizens safe against murderers that do not use armies and bombers and battleships but rather box cutters, airlines and anthrax powder, he eliminated our defense department — which in thiswar, is the CIA and the other Intelligence services.  With one exception, I have not heard of a single case of a US citizen’s rights being infringed by the Patriot Act. The single exception is that of the “US Citizen” who — while technically a citizen — is a Jihadi immigrant who was assembling the materials for a radioactive bomb that would have killed a few hundred thousand of his “fellow citizens.”

The CIA is the immune system of the country. It operates invisibly to kill invading threats. This case officer confirmed what I have known from other intelligence operatives: namely, that “several” (to me that would be more than three and less than twenty, which would be “scores”) attacks EQUAL TO OR EXCEEDING 9/11 have been stopped by these people specifically because of the intelligence-gathering tools provided by the Patriot Act. But those men and women and their lifetime of experience are now leaving the agency in droves, specifically because this Leftist President — like most leftists — sees his own people as the enemy of peace and not the 7th Century savages that would have peace-loving people like Mary living in a Burka and unable to leave the house without male escort.

I’m afraid, Mary, that if you have your way you will not be legal assistant to anyone, and neither will any of your daughters, sisters, mothers or aunts. Their job, and yours, will be to create male children, and succumb to whatever beatings, rapes and “honor killings” the men you create may feel entitled to at the whim of the moment. This is the inevitable outcome of having a president that attacks not the germs but the white blood cells. Obama is giving the American immune system AIDS.

When the subject of Obama as a “peacemaker” comes up, people like Mary seem to think that the answer is to be nice and talk to people and the problem will go away. This is known as “mirroring,” and it is the blind spot that most people bring to negotiations — the idea that our opponents want the same things we do. In Afghanistan we are dealing with an enemy who insists on praying to Allah multiple times a day, who believes that women are subhuman, that homosexuals be killed on sight (preferably by crushing them under falling walls — look it up) and that any criticism of Allah, his Prophet (PBOH) or his clerics is punishable by beating or death. That is their IRREDUCIBLE CORE BELIEF SYSTEM and for that they are willing to die. We, on the other hand, believe in fundamental human dignity for all, the right to worship or not as we see fit, the right of women and homosexuals to live lives as equal members of society, and the fundamental right to say whatever we damn well choose. Those in turn are OUR IRREDUCIBLE CORE BELIEF SYSTEMS for which SOME of us are willing to fight and die.

Now Mary, perhaps you can tell me where the talking, Nobel Peace Prize-winning,  negotiatable answer to this conflict lies? Jihadis will not be talked down into worshiping Allah only two times a day, allowing women out of the Burka on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays nor will they allow criticism of their religion on months that have an “R” in it. Likewise, I am not willing to be forced to pray to Allah on even-numbered days, nor will I give up my freedom to say what I think except on Freedom Tuesday.

So there you have it. Irreducible conflicts of FUNDAMENTAL BASIC INTERESTS will sometimes lead to war. That is beyond debate, and you cannot show a time in history where this was not the case. I on the other hand, can show you a continuous spectrum of human history where this has always been the case, and I can go further. I can show you many instances where a civilization grew to power and success on the basis of courage, hard work, individual responsibility and belief in their own greatness, and then, over a few decades of success, became self-satisfied moral cowards who were too comfortable with their own lives to face the reality of what lay outside those city walls and therefor lost the will and the moral and physical courage to defend it. Those societies are dust now, and the finely-robed defenders of talk and negotiation and Peace Prizes were put to the sword if they were men, raped and murdered if they were women or sold into slavery if they were children.

I for one am against seeing that happen. If you believe that a good society does not deserve to defend itself against bad societies merely because philosophers like Michael Moore have concluded it is not perfect then we are in trouble. And forgive me for making this personal, but if you support this weakening of our defenses and the politicians that call for them, then you become responsible for the consequences of the next attack in the same way that I am responsible for the civilian deaths and subsequent freedom of the people in Iraq, the invasion of which I supported with my votes. I would remind you in closing that the terror attacks of 9/11 started planning in 1995, at the height of the Clinton feel-good Presidency, and that numerous dry runs had taken place before Bush was elected. This idea that if we are nice to them they will leave us alone is demonstrable false in the face of the EVIDENCE, as is the fact that an aggressive defense also produces EVIDENCE that this can keep us secure.

I would have expected a legal mind to have more respect for cause and effect and the ability to weigh evidence than you seem to show.

Respectfully,

Bill Whittle

[A little late for the note, but from the comments I realize some people thought I might have been a lawyer myself. Nope. Just a naturally argumentative cuss who is occasionally privy to some lawerly conversations. ]