“On one side are the Traditionalists. We believe that church and State should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life. We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions. We believe that individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by a village, and that marriage is a sacred relationship between a man and a woman.”

“On the other side of this culture war are the Left-Wing Liberals. They are uncomfortable with our traditions, with the inevitable inequalities of our free-market economy, and with our military power. They dislike our values, our morality, and our unabashed displays of patriotism. At first — back in the 1960s — they were content merely to develop and pursue their own radical culture within ours. They tuned out, turned to drugs, and pushed the level of sexual license to a point our country had never known. They were so distressed by our imperfections that they refused to recognize or celebrate our achievements.”

“Then they tuned in, and developed a political agenda whose logical outcome would be the overthrow of the American Revolution itself. While we believe that power flows from God to the people, they believe the supreme power is the State, which decides what rights, if any, should be allowed to the people. And because there is no God above the State, there also is no truth; no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil. Since they are working to do good — by their definition of the word — whatever crimes they commit along the way don’t matter.”

“So great is this gulf between the Traditionalists and the Left-Wing Liberals — and so irreconcilable are the differences — that our decades-long political struggle has amounted to a kind of second Civil War. And for several years now, it’s been a stalemate. This is why so many elections are so close, why so many Supreme Court decisions are split 5-4, and why we’ve been unable to act decisively on any of the issues that confront us – the war, the economy, energy, healthcare, border control, immigration, and all the rest. One way or the other, the Culture War’s stalemate is about to be broken.”

“By choosing Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate — and by staking his own claim to the presidency on “Country First” more than on any specific policy initiative — John McCain has thrown the switch and put us Traditionalists onto the offense. By doing so he has unleashed the energy and the will to victory among Traditionalists that have been dormant for so long the Left-Wing Liberals mistakenly assumed we’d lost. And by taking the over-confident Left-Wing Liberals so completely by surprise, McCain has stunned them into revealing themselves for the vicious phonies that they are.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/the_culture_wars_decisive_batt_1.html

The money quote: “Then they tuned in, and developed a political agenda whose logical outcome would be the overthrow of the American Revolution itself.”

Group, group, group, group. This is still Marxist ideology which does not recognize the unique and sacred individuality of each man, woman and child. Marxist ideology and even Godless Capitalist ideology (same thing really), view people as things, as “molecules,” and their worth and identity is measured in their ability to produce or consume, i.e.: to perform an economic transaction. Grouping people by race, sex, age, etc., etc., is useful in Marxist ideology, because these economic transactions can be further quantitated and categorized. The group becomes more important than the individual; the individual is minimized; but the religious understanding is that the individual is still supreme – made in the image of God – with an eternal soul. Grouping may be helpful in any study of economics, but it should never demote the value of any individual, and this is something that our founders recognized when they stated that our essential human rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are individual God-given rights – not group rights.

“Finally, “scientific socialism” proclaims that the historical process is controlled by immanent laws which are independent of human will. An understanding of these laws makes history predictable. This conception was formed under the obvious influence of the advances of natural science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, above all, the success of astronomy in predicting the discovery of planets, the return of comets, etc. Fourier asserts that mankind is ruled by the laws of “attraction of the passions,” which are in his view precisely analogous to Newton’s law of gravitation, whereby “the unity of the physical and the spiritual worlds is manifest.” In terms of this analogy, individuals correspond to the elemental particles of matter, which must be identical (at least, from the standpoint of properties essential to the phenomenon under consideration–that is, history). As for Marxism, one thinks of an analogy with another physical theory. This is the kinetic theory of gases, according to which a gas is the aggregate of molecules that come into collision, with the result of each collision determined by the laws of mechanics. A very great number of molecules transform the statistical laws of their collision into the general laws of the physics of gases. The only form of social contact of the producers of goods in capitalist society is exchange (just as for gas molecules the only form of interaction is collision). The interaction of a great number of producers engenders that “social production” which, in its turn, determines their political, legal and religious notions, and the “social, political and spiritual processes of life in general.” Igor Shafarevich

“We have arrived at this view of socialism in attempting to account for the contradictions evident in the phenomenon at first glance. And now, looking back, we feel confident that our approach indeed accounts for many of socialism’s peculiarities. Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism, as well as with the attempt to prove that man exists only as a manifestation of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.” Igor Shafarevich

http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html

The tv ruminations are excellent –what you’ve quoted is referred to elsewhere i think as the ”flattening” effect characteristic of so-called ‘post-modernism’. Concentrating on tv as the engine is helpful –rings true –as otherwise it has to be ascribed to ‘poor education’ or the even easier ‘fashion’. Tv images for sure change brains –the biology of image-routing vs symbolic thought, alone must give pause to any notion of mere superficial effect of tv on the formative.

Obama a wave in the river of time flowing past a cutoff silted-in ox-bow lake McCain would make nice lite verse as it so perfectly fits the young man/old man theme, but real poetry, epochal becuz of the Prize, would have to see Obama as the cheshire cat, PoMo Futureman hovering above the horizontal plane, gazing with bemusement down upon the faraway McCain, clinging bitterly to mortal combat, back to the river, wounded, but until Gabriel blows his horn, holding off the armies of chaos.

The tv ruminations are excellent –what you’ve quoted is referred to elsewhere i think as the ”flattening” effect characteristic of so-called ‘post-modernism’. Concentrating on tv as the engine is helpful –rings true –as otherwise it has

“Trow lamented the destruction by television of American public culture and sense of history. “Middle-distance” institutions that had long given Americans’ lives real contexts (such as fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, and women’s clubs), had been abandoned when people stayed home to watch television. Television shows were false contexts designed to be just attractive enough to keep people watching. Without the middle-distance institutions, what remained as real options for people to live in were “the grid of two hundred million” (the U.S. population at the time) and “the grid of intimacy” (the immediate family). Only celebrities, who had a real life in both grids, were now perceived to be complete. People became lonely and, in order to feel complete, wanted to be on television in order to become celebrities themselves.[5]

Because television sells products by pleasing demographically defined groups, viewers learned to think of themselves demographically. In consequence, demography had replaced history as the context for understanding the world. People understood themselves as members of lateral demographic groups rather than as part of a linear flow of people from the past into the future. Things were now valued not on an absolute scale, but by discovering if one was in tune with one’s group. Trow illustrates this point with a reference to Family Feud, where a contestant was asked to guess “what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman. Guess what they guessed. Guess what they guessed the average is.”[6]…”

McCain’s VP choice suggests he’s thinking demographically. Obama is the one with an historical imagination.

If I were you I would stop trumpeting O’s lawschool “accomplishments”. Whereas the average journal writer jumps at the chance to be published, we have had no confirmation that O produced anything other than one collection of unpublished “notes” (which are often 5-6 pages long, as opposed to the 40-page length of many full-fledged articles). O knew that he didn’t have to exert himself as editor: his half-black skin and white guilt exerted themselves on the usual left-wing suspects. I know firsthand about the write-on process, and it’s an open secret that minority candidates are held to a lower standard. Several months ago I watched a hapless 2L advisor at my school explain our Affirmative Action policies to an audience of 1L’s. The derision from many students was palpable, and you could tell she was mortified by the whole thing. This was DESPITE the fact that our campus is extremely “progressive”, with support for “O” at perhaps 90-95%.

I’ve been examining how O’s experience as a “Legal Expert” has affected his candidacy. Obama at one point stated that once elected, he and his attorney general would overturn Bush’s “illegal” laws-a shocking gaffe that mischaracterizes the executive branch’s powers. In his defense of the Boumediene travesty, O also said that Kennedy ruled in accordance with the precedent established at Nuremberg because the Nazis had been granted Habeas Corpus (problem is, they WEREN’T).

Acqaintances from his teaching days remember a distant man who was rarely willing (or able?) to engage in the vibrant teacher’s-lounge discussions characteristic of legal faculty. His classroom style revealed a fixation on “hot button” identity politics issues at the expense of less “exciting” areas of the law. Should the Magic Negro get himself elected, this intellectual underdevelopment will have an interesting effect, what with a bad economy and hotspots flaring up from Tblisi to Tehran. Just remember that he’s a Hah-vahd man, and that therefore we MUST be in good hands.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/obamas_ignorance_of_the_law.html

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/barack_obama_legal_scholar.html

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3591