Author: bfaure

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Aftermath

     After almost a month of turmoil and chaos in the Capitol Building of the state of Wisconsin, the State Senate of Wisconsin on the night of March 9th brought to a crashing halt the sense of drift and paralysis that the state’s legislative process had become. Unable to secure a quorum for a controversial budget repair bill as the minority party simply left the state rather than be present for their certain legislative defeat, the majority senate leadership determined to remove the quorum required elements of the bill and passed the rest, effectively overhauling the relationship between the government and its employees. Brought to an abrupt end was one of the most blatant attempts by politicians in state history to disenfranchise the voters who had elected the majority to perform precisely as they did. The vote was taken under the threat of violence, death threats, recall threats, and verbal intimidation by a vocal incensed crowd at the Capitol rotunda who overwhelming felt that the democratic process was defined not by the means of representative democracy, but instead by their individual sense of righteousness.  The absent democrat politicians, caught by their distant refuge in another state, found themselves helpless to effect debate and could only watch from afar as their cherished relationship with public unions went directly up against the voters’ mandate, and was found wanting.


     The result was a firm repudiation of the incestuous relationship that has developed over the last four decades between government and its public servants, who discovered that the the financial assets of a state could be hijacked by forcing the state to financially back the back the unions that turned around and invested in politicians who would toe the line and assure continued government growth and union largess. The changes are so profound in their effect on the balance equation of power for each side that the fevered process and the aftermath of the vote will change forever traditional concepts of the American experience of democracy, individual rights, and individual responsibility.

1) The Damage to the Concept of Representative Democracy:          The Wisconsin battle forever changes the perception of America’s respect for the concept of representative democracy and reason for fair and conclusive elections.  Starting with the debacle of the Presidential election of 2000, a progressive lack of respect for the elective process has developed.  Neither the winners nor the losers of theat election have ever respected the outcome. The winners remain convinced of the visible voter fraud that pushed close states into the loser column, the lack of understanding and respect for the concept of electoral college election as outlined in the nation’s constitution, and the attempt to hijack the outcome by cherry picking specific votes over others that secured their vision of the election.  The losers remain convinced that the popular mandate as determined by number of votes was definitive and warped by the electoral college process, and that the rights of individual voters, no matter how vague the capacity to discern their intent, were ultimately disenfranchised.  The concept of a winning or losing an election and accepting the outcome became blurred by interpretation of the vote, so that modern elections for president or for local dogcatcher are poisoned with the same re-interpretation of voter intent, and elections often go for months without a declared winner.  

     Additionally, the loss in the election is seen as only a matter of interpretation, and not outcome, and the loser is under no obligation to accept the consequences.    The dramatic repudiation of the direction of government declared by the Wisconsin voter last November with the election of overwhelming republican representatives in federal, state, and local positions was interpreted as an outburst of anger, not a mandate for change, and therefore one that could be ignored as the current anger against any change was felt to be equally as intense and therefore, as legitimate.

      The result is the dangerously weakened compact of a representative democracy between the voter and the elected official.  The idea that change can occur if the voter determines to vote for change, has been recklessly thrown away by the current Wisconsin chaos.  The very strength of a democracy lies in the recognition by those whose ideas are on the losing side of the electoral process are accepting of that process, so that someday if their view prevails, the process will be accepting of their requested change. The current view, that some ideas are so critical that no representative should be able to debate them and hold them to scrutiny and change is anti-democratic and anathema to the balance that has permitted give and take in public discourse since the Civil War.  Although the Wisconsin ordeal culminated in the eventual affirmation of representative democracy, the effort to immediately recall those Senators who represented their constituents in the manner mandated by their election distorts the reasons for having elections in intervals that allow the voter’s intent to evolve and be judged in outcome.   As President Obama himself said in the healthcare debate when a minority politician expressed the opinion that their point of view was not adequately represented in the bill, “Get over it; we won.” As cold as that statement was, it was inherently American. If the voter finds the direction taken by their elected representative is against the majority will, they can always vote them out at the next election.  Or at least, that is what the whole system of representative democracy is predicated upon.

2) The Sense of Entitlement:       The previous four decades have seen the progressive entwining of public employees and the government that feeds them to the detriment of the society’s ability to improve itself.  The securing of more and more generous rewards in the face of progressively poorer outcomes have left the future of the society to progress in doubt, and the funds to repair damage and invest in good ideas steadily swallowed up by entitlements.  The Wisconsin debacle initiated with previous administrations continual shoving of key problems and investments down the road, in order to fund current guarantees to public employees that exceeded all reason or comparison with those of the private sector.  The virulent response in particular of the teacher’s union exposed for all time their fundamental reason for existence was for the protection of perks, not the assurance of their product and professionalism.  The cry “for the Children” is forever placed in the dustbin of all other progressive movements.  When the choice came down to the acceptance of a modest responsibility in the rising costs of generous healthcare plans and pensions, the union declared its willingness to allow its own members to lose their jobs, rather than all sharing in modest sacrifice.  The Union determined to take advantage of the stalemate in the legislative process to ram through local contracts protecting their entitlements, knowing full well the result would be the loss of jobs and more dramatically the elimination of educational opportunities and programs of the very students they were purportedly the stewards of.  The protection of these perks in the face of crashing standards in education, devastating incapacities in the ability of students to read and perform math, the continuing tenure of teachers who conclusively show no ability  to teach, the maintenance of immunity to the needs of society have been particularly exposed.  It remains to be seen if the separation of the union from its subservient teacher monopoly will finally bear fruit in the objective appreciation of how far our educational process has fallen, and its standards contaminated.

3) The First Of Many Battles for the Future of a Distinct American Society:     The Wisconsin experience proved that the entrenched interests created by government expansion into all of our lives has a parallel effect on Americans as it has had  on Europeans, and that our unique set of individual rights and system of checks and balances do not protect the individual Americans against the tyranny of the entitlement class with any more assurance.  Last year, when European governments attempted to reign in suffocating entitlements threatening the very existence of countries, the reaction of those entitled was virulent, rigid, and prolonged, and resulted in the governments backing down.  This experience and the subsequent reaction in Wisconsin proves that it is not the “socialist” bent or lack thereof of a country’s makeup but simply a relative matter of numbers.  When a sufficient number of the population rely more on the government to assure their futures then their own capacities, talents, and entrepreneurial spirit, the society will be helpless to affect change.  This country’s progressive need to seek a governmental answer to every challenge or vagary in life is the single most determining factor in obstructing America’s future health and success.  It is no small consideration that this process has eventually pulled down every previous historical dominant country and America will prove no different.  The battle for the concept of individual rights and opportunity versus societal security is on, and Wisconsin was its first epic battle.

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While Rome Burns

     In a no holds bared debate, the US Senate recently reviewed two plans for cutting budgetary items in the residual 2010 fiscal year.  This was required was due to the lassitude of the previous reactionary Congress, recently voted out of office by the American public, who found themselves unable to perform their constitutional duties and submit an actual budget, while still managing to spend trillions.  The new Republican led Congressional House of Representatives determined to submit at least an effort at budgetary sanity, proposing a 61 billion dollar reduction in projected spending, considerably below their stated goal of 100 billion.  The US Senate, still in the hands of the Democrat party, countered with a paltry 4 billion dollar reduction plan.  The good news is, after considering both plans, the Senate determined to reject both as being too draconian.  The Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in an effort to explain the defeat, stated that examples such as the cancelling of public funds for prestigious budgetary items such as National Endowment for the Arts would eliminate the public’s opportunity to such products as the “Cowboy Poetry Festival” that had provided entertainment to thousands.

     In other news, the United States of America declared a deficit of expenditures over income of  223 billion dollars for the month of February alone.  To put this in perspective, the budgetary deficit for the entire year of 2007 was 163 billion.  At the current pace, the United States of America is on pace to run an over 2 Trillion dollar deficit for 2011.  This would put the first three years of the Obama presidency at a staggering pace of deficit spending of over 4.7 Trillion dollars, racking up more debt in three years than the government of the United States incurred in the first 220 years as a nation.   The estimated effect on borrowed monetary resources to pay such indebtedness results in the expectation the interest payments on the debt by 2019 will exceed entitlement health expenditures.  Money going predominantly to foreign sources will dominate the budget. The entitlements we are forever giving ourselves are leading to the funds necessary to keep the party going coming from the Bank of China and the Savings and Loan of Saudi Arabia. That should turn out well.

If you can’t afford emotionally to cut the funding sources for “Cowboy Poetry” for fear of offending, oh, I dont know…cowboys…how are you ever going to take on the monster pie of entitlements? Now that’s going to get some real cowboys angry. Just ask the heroes in Wisconsin who are risking death threats to do just that.

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Birthday of a Rock Star

      What did you accomplish by your 24th birthday? Well, the pleasant little stone carving pictured above was the work of a young Italian from Caprese named Michelangelo, and it is worth reminding us all of this man’s brilliance and contribution to western civilization on the occasion of his birthday today. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6th, 1475, in the Tuscan nursery of one of the truly great explosions of man’s intellect and creativity, the Italian Renaissance. He was one of a line of spectacular talents that the beautiful rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside seemed to boundlessly produce, including Leonardo DaVinci, Ghirlandaio, Giotto, Duccio, Donatello, and Botticelli. Of this group of giants he was in particular, the Rock Star, a sculptor of immense talent and visions that could extract the most base human emotion and tension out of inert marble stone. His talents were recognized by his father early in life, and he managed to get young Michelangelo  into the De’Medici school for artists in Florence, where he had access to the Medici’s great collection of Roman age sculpture and technical training from the sculptor Bertoldo Giovanni, but it was obvious to all that the student would soon be the teacher. The magnificent PIETA pictured above was Michelangelo’s early twenties coming out party, and he followed that masterpiece with the equally spectacular DAVID. The intense sorrow of the Madonna for her dead son of the PIETA is transposed into the young male arrogance and aggression of the powerful DAVID, muscled, tensed, scanning the horizon for his opponent the giant Goliath, and convinced of the outcome of the titanic battle. These are not the emotionless immortals of Roman art. These are personal, entirely human subjects that are ageless not in their eternal youth, but in the universality of their human emotions and intellect.

     Michelangelo considered himself above all, a Rock Star, and never stopped in his words releasing the entrapped figures that were encased in stone, but he was not beyond showing his virtuosity in the artistic venue he thought least of, the art of painting. A sculptor of monuments needed a monumental scale for his painting expressions and found it in Pope Julius II’s commission to Michelangelo to the paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Asked to devise paintings of the 12 Apostles, Michelangelo lobbied and won the Pope’s permission to dramatically expand the scope to the story of Man’s Divine creation by God, the Downfall of Man, and the Promise of Salvation through the guidance of Christ. This huge fresco contained over 300 figures and nine episodes from the book of Genesis, culminating for the viewer in the spectacle of the CREATION OF ADAM , the critical spark of humanity, encompassing all its creativity, capability, and dark flaws, passed from the Creator to his creation with the recognition of free will passed between their eyes. The myths of the chapel ceiling suggest that Pope Julius in a perpetual battle with Michelangelo and his difficult personality, looked to the ceiling as a way of reining him in, by forcing him to express himself in the media he was least comfortable with, fresco, allowing for comparisons with his contemporary rival, Raphael. If the story is true, no one viewing the Sistine Chapel upon its completion had any doubt of the dominant figure in Renaissance artistic expression thereafter.

      At a time when human free will and expression were under the oppressive dominance of a universal church and dictatorial overlords like the Medicis, artist of Michelangelo’s stature led surprisingly unencumbered existences. He lived life like he wanted, stated what was on his mind, and refused to work for patrons he felt would not allow him artistic freedom. A dangerous tact of life for most to take, Michelangelo’s genius appears to have been the unseen protector for him, as patrons clambered and competed for his time for project after project.
      Michelangelo lived to the ripe old age of 88 when the average lifespan was in the forties, and remained prolific to his death. It is hard to view the Renaissance development without his pronounced imprint upon it. A man of his age, he was more a human for all ages, living the ideal of the human individual at a time when a individual life was unrecorded and unappreciated, and showed that the most valuable components of civilization were not its tyrant kings, but its individual talents and creativity. On the occasion of his 526th birthday, Ramparts of Civilization takes this moment to thank him for helping to make the world a better, more interesting place for the rest of us.

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The Tip Of The Spear

     I had occasion on a recent trip to place myself into history.  In San Diego, California, the USS Midway, an American aircraft carrier is docked as a permanent museum and provides a wonderful window into the  forward most arm of America’s military capacity in this dangerous world in which we live.  Aircraft carriers in World War II became the means of projecting power across the globe, proven first by Japan in her spectacular raid on Pearl Harbor, and magnified by the catastrophic vulnerability of the traditional king of the seas, the battleship,  with the Japanese airborne destruction of the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse off Singapore all in December, 1941.  By the end of the war, the United States had over 50 aircraft carriers roaming the seas and dominated all the sea lanes in a fashion not seen since the height of the British Imperial Navy of Lord Nelson’s time. 

     The USS Midway, commissioned at the end of the war, was the supreme example of the art of carrier building in her time.  She was larger, more maneuverable ship than her Essex style counterparts of the era, and with her like designed compatriots, the USS Franklin D Roosevelt and the USS Coral Sea, were the last craft designed for propeller craft take off and landing.  She was nearly 1000 feet long, capable of launching over 100 aircraft, sailing at 33 knots, and home to over 4000 sailors – a true floating city of power.  The Midway ended up serving for the next 40 years through both the Vietnam conflict and Desert Storm before being decommissioned in 1992.  Though the United States eventually went to a nuclear class carrier design even larger than the Midway, the ship proved versatile enough to head a carrier group in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm launching hundreds of F-18 sorties over Kuwait and Iraq that contributed to the overwhelming victory.

     The museun allows a very intimate look at almost all aspects of the ship.  Despite the enormous size of the ship, the multiple bulkheads and millions of yards of exposed wires and cable give the vistor a claustrophobic sense when traversing the inner decks.  This feeling is immediately relieved by entering the enormous hanger deck where the aircraft are stored and serviced.  The planes are transitioned by elevator to the even more spacious flight deck, where the dangerous ballet of launching craft was practiced by thousands of highly trained flight teams over the years.  The reality of taking a craft from 0 to 200 miles an hour over several hundred feet to launch and the converse, from 200 miles an hour to a standing stop over the same distance with scores of fully armed fully fueled planes and scores of scurrying flight personnel  is a awe inspiring and palpably dangerous concept.

      From  the aircraft decks one travels to the intellectual center of the plane, the so called “Island”, where the communications,  mission planning, deck activity coordination, and the captain’s bridge inhabit.  The space is particularly confined to make room for the critical space of the flight deck activities, and is rested to the side of the carrier.  The Air Boss on the Midway was flight deck level, always a squadron leader who understood all the capacities  and limitations of the flight team, and had full control of the launch process.  The ship’s navigation, steering, and direction emanate from the bridge which stands several stories over the deck with full view of the deck and the sea beyond.  Just beyond the bridge is the communications and mission projection rooms, where, coordination of the complicated actions of this massive sea enterprise is coordinated with the multiple naval craft in the group through radar and radio communication, and nowadays, computer and GPS.

     The final image and all encompassing sense of the enormous sea power projected by a ship like this comes down to standing on the deck with the planes that are the multiple arrows of the carrier quiver.  What does it take in the process to steel one’s nerves to land a plane on a pitching deck at night in high seas is not for me comprehensible, but somehow this nation continues to find such people who time and time again volunteer and perform beyond all expectation this difficult task.  The practice and precision required is the highest expression of military training and the United States with eleven super-carrier groups manning all shipborne seas is the master performer of this art.

     We can argue amongst ourselves always as to whether the investment and sacrifice necessary to create this magnificent floating warrior ship is ultimately worth it, but if you get the chance to see it in person, I think you will realize that if it is to be done, this nation has achieved the ultimate in this particular expression of modern power.

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Its Time For An Intervention

     In the parlance of counseling and therapy an intervention is a device by which an orchestrated effort is used to confront an individual of his or her addiction and impel them to seek professional help.  Used as a life saving device in hard core addiction, it can frequently be the last step between the addict and their impending self destruction.  The need for an intervention is now coming clear regarding the 14 democrat state senators from Wisconsin that have fled the state and taken up residence in Illinois to avoid participating in a vote to establish a budget fix for the state of Wisconsin.  Their self destructive behavior is evident from their blatant avoidance of the job they were elected to perform, representing their constituents in parliamentary debate and votes that could determine the future policies by which the state would abide.  But what is their addiction requiring intervention?

    The addiction is not drug or alcohol related, but every bit as insidiously destructive in the individual’s core beliefs and capacity for objective thought.  It is the addiction to monetary support and block votes provided by public sector unions to the individual politician that has made their current position entirely reliant upon these two pillars of addiction and a future in politics inconceivable without them.  It has led them to the impossible position of living outside their own state that they were elected to represent, unable to remain in Illinois and still be able to participate in the legislative process that would allow them to effect debate, and unable to return and receive the wrath of their virulent underwriters who would look at their return as the ultimate sell out.

     A more difficult conundrum is hard to imagine.  How did this proud party become such an addled and addicted servant to the will of the public sector union?  Since its inception as the ‘republican” party of Thomas Jefferson and later, formalized as the party of the common man through Andrew Jackson, the Democrat Party has idealistically stood for those striving to achieve, not those with the levers of power.  Like all parties, it has had its hypocrisies and hypocrites to deal with, but prior to the mid 1960’s was easily recognized by the idealized position of standing by the individual and their rights and responsibilities, looking to improve access to good education, equal opportunity under the law, and a fair shake and safety in the work place.  The growth of government positioned to legislate and regulate those ideals steadily led a permanence in the need for a “victim” class to require the bureaucracies securing those protections and a “regulator” class to assure the regulations saw no sunset.   It was only a matter of time before those in permanent “public service” saw the need to reward themselves for their “selfless” behavior in serving the public, and assure a elective process that would institutionalize those rewards.  An awkward partnership between the politicians who determined the budgetary processes that secured the permanence of those rewards and the representatives of the “public service” class to secure elected officials who fully “understood” their selfless behavior led to the collapse of the integrity of the Democrat party we see today.  The constituents that drive the current democrat elected official are not the citizens who need education, but the teachers that educate them, not the people who need protection under the law but those that would protect them, not the down trodden who need guidance to elevate themselves, but those maintain their downtrodden status through their perpetual victimization.  The modern American workforce, once heavily populated with union representation in the work place is now less than 7% unionized, while the public sector, immune to the priority of profits and production, over 36% unionized.  The public sector has become a last bastion for union strategies, tying ever more expensive benefits on the passive taxpayer, to whom they see no need to answer to.  They now answer only to their own calling, “to serve”, to determine the inherent value for such service, and secure those in office that will never seek to reflect upon their relative value to similar contributors in the private work place.

     And so, the need for an intervention.  Interventions are often initially confrontational, and perhaps not voluntary, but the self destructive individual helpless to effect their own life change, often breathes a sigh of relief when they realize the door to one horror is shut, and the chance for a new beginning has opened.  I would suggest to the senators who have flown, imagine a world where you could fight for the rights of the educational process on the merits of whether a funded program helped or hurt that education, without concerning oneself with the guarantee that the 80% of funding going to educational processes regardless of their success or value went to permanent staffing costs. Imagine fighting for a child to have choice in educational opportunities independent of the circumstances of their residence or upbringing. Imagine a world where the teacher that inspired the student could be rewarded and the one that showed no teaching capacity avoided, and you as a senator helped bring it about.  What a liberating rush that probably would be to your ideals, when you could use your own free thought and creativity to devise legislative concepts rather than have to pass every action you take past the masters of your indebtedness.

     An intervention is what these senators will need, and when they are free of their addiction, it will be like spring has returned, with democracy in the arena of ideas, the fruitful blossom of a great harvest to be.

                                                                                                           www.hyscience.com

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People We Should Know #9 – Daniel Hannan

     Since the 1950’s, when  Great Britain, beset with the crushing debt and physical exhaustion of having fought two massive wars in twenty years, voluntarily gave up the mantle as a a world leader, the country has been in a steady decline in creativity and influence internationally. This is a natural consequence of the progression of an inward looking population that has become more concerned with personal security than industriousness.  This process  has certainly been accelerated by the willingness of the United States, a country Great Britain shared common foundations with, to accept the mantle of military and economic superpower that was once Great Britain’s.   The country that helped to create legal process,  educational capacities, the industrial revolution, scientific progress with Newtonian physics, the discovery of the atom and penicillin, has spent the last fifty years concentrating on the balance of a nations resources and its comfort.

     This is not to say that Great Britain has given up on one very special attribute that is uniquely British, the special skill of articulate debate.  The British educational system continues to produce informed thinkers who are not afraid to express their opinion in a fashion of structured argument, with the bombast left for others.  Daniel Hannan is a rising star of this school of debate, and a Person We Should Know.  Born in Lima, Peru to an English family, but educated through British bastions of Marborough College and Oxford, his diverse exposure to the world has led him to be both multi-lingual in English, French, and Spanish, and thoroughly aware of the various structures of government and social policy that define the western experience of the twentieth century, and equally comfortable with the intellect and rapid response required of the tradition of British debate.  At the young age of 39, he has already served his southeast English district in British Parliament for a decade and as a conservative representative in the European Parliament since 2009.  He is a modern interlocutor, using the internet as a podium for intellectual outreach and discussion. He holds strongly principled belief in the damaging role bureaucracy plays in societal progress and economic development, and has been a strong opponent of European integration and socialist instincts.  He has been especially forceful in his arguments for privatizing reform of the sacred cow of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, which he blames for low survival rates in cancer and stroke treatments, poor hospital conditions, and inexorable waiting lists for procedures.  He is a strong supporter of American leadership of the free world as the world  in his view continues to be threatened with forces of fascistic suppression of individual rights and opportunity, for so long held back only by American willingness to confront far flung dictators and  stand for free markets and individual rights.  He is seeing now, however, a progressive fatigue building in America to replace individual industriousness with collective security and a retrenchment from world leadership responsibilities similar to  what Great Britain went through a half century ago, and demands are attention.

     In an important book recently published,  The New Road To Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America , Hannan decries the insidious creep of socialist tendencies in the American legislative process and outlines the learning lessons for American in mistakes British Parliament has already made with similar decision points and their effect on British life.  How apropo this book is in watching the current struggles in Wisconsin, New Jersey  and other states to corral forces that would drive the United States into the obligations of cradle to grave guarantees that have so corrupted the flexibility of European political processes to deal with new challenges.

     Whether in full agreement or not with British thought, Hannan is one of a growing set of modern debaters such as Paul Ryan, Boris Johnson,  and Chris Christie that bring their considerable intellect to bear in a strong cohesive argument for stopping western societal decline and self induced economic suicide.  The sad fact of modern debate is that conservative minds are progressively the deliverers of constructive and complex thought and so called liberals the defenders of reactionary chants, fact suppression, and name calling. Where is our modern John Kenneth Galbraith?  Certainly not hiding in Illinois…

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The Landscape Artists of the American Ideal

       The North American continent landmass has inspired from its first explorers onward a special spiritual awareness.  The explorers and early settlers, predominantly from lands crowded with civilization and restricted by their birth position found a overwhelming sense of a higher reality in the huge, untamed, and essentially uninhabited and unbounded country.  Even as the eastern seaboard began to gain a civility more associated with its older European ancestral home, a group of artists determined to evoke in their landscapes the enormity and beauty of the American wilderness before the contracting effects of a civilizing humanity.  They are known collectively as the Hudson River School artists, and have maintained an almost 200 year grip on the American public’s artistic appreciation of the land in which we live.

      The recognized founder of the group was Thomas Cole, who through his paintings of the lower Hudson River valley, began the separation of man’s influences from God’s in the scope and intimate details assigned to the landscape, rather than man’s action within that landscape. His pupil Frederic Edwin Church, influenced greatly by Cole and of superior talent, made the style prominent and valued, and he and his contemporaries John Kensett and Sanford Gifford created a subvein of landscape known as Luminism, where nature’s intense light took on sacred power and spiritual overtones, increasing the landscape’s monumental status and drama.  The zenith of the movement was 1855 to 1875, when Church and the great interpreter of the American West, Albert Bierstadt put on shows that brought something not seen before in American art culture, ticket sales, public buzz, and celebrity status.

esbit     The American populus has lived the double life of manifest destiny and regret for the loss of the unsullied nature of the land they conquered.   It is the eternal argument of progress, that which  is lost in the effort to bring progress and order, that was captured perfectly by the Hudson River artists.  It is at the heart of America’s notion of the the land’s romantic lure and its inseparable link to the sense of exceptionalism.  The measurable wonder that led to a unique American invention, the National Park, was a direct result of these artists, and influences the great American landscape interpreters, like Jacob Collins and Peter Nisbet, to this day. 

   

     The Hudson River School artists were not Nature’s illustrators, but rather God’s photographers, and they remain some of the best reasons to visit the premier American Museums.  They continue to illuminate the special pact of a land and its people, and keep this American experiment from getting too lost in what brings us comfort, and more appropriately focused on what brings us such wonder and thanks.

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The Man In The Arena

     In early November, 2010, the citizens of the state of Wisconsin elected the chief executive of Milwaukee County to the governorship of the state of Wisconsin on the basis of his reputation for fiscal discipline and firm resolve.   The state of Wisconsin, like most governments of the United States, including its federal one, had seen progressive growth in its entitlement obligations to the point of strangulation of every objective utilization of state resources for the public good for any other purpose.  The previous governor, facing similar budgetary obligations and fiscal pressures, unconstitutionally transferred funds from other critical areas of obligation, the state physician’s patient compensation fund and the transportation fund, and raised over two billion dollars in taxes in one of the most taxed states in the union, in order to avoid confronting the visible entitlement bomb in the budget. The previous elected legislative bodies conspiratorially kicked the building budget crisis to future governments to address.   The election of November, additionally converting both the Wisconsin state legislative Assembly and Senate to Republican despite a traditionally liberal electorate, showed the publics’ determination to have the government fundamentally transformed back to a fiscally conscious and publicly responsive entity.   It was no accident of fate that they put Scott Walker in the governor’s chair to direct the process.

     Scott Walker has been the anti-politician politician for most of his public life.  He has on multiple occasions now been the politician elected to clean up other people’s messes.  In one of the more liberal counties in the United States, Milwaukee County he managed as a conservative to be elected and overwhelmingly re-elected based on his pecular adult habit of performing in office exactly as he said he would.  In a county wounded by a spectacular pension heist propagated upon the tax payers by the county’s elected officials, securing pension obligations that made hundreds of pension millionaires, Walker, obligated by law to support the promises, assured that no further tax increases would go to prop up the poison pension pill locked in by the previous executive.   He cleaned up the mess to the tune of eight consecutive balanced county budgets without increases in the tax levy, cut his own salary while demanding sacrifices by other public employees, reduced and privatized the county workforce where feasible, and achieved it all with a mercilessly confrontational democrat common council that sought every opportunity to undermine his efforts.   The anti-politician politician calmly held his ground, maintained his principles, and did not break his pact with the voting public.

     Now the stage is the larger state governmental process but the in-dwelling hypocrites are the same and the task very similar for Walker.  The sense of entitlement by state employees to the public treasure is if anything magnified and their willingness to scuttle any attempt to change the bias equations that have served them so well for so long a matter of holy war.  The democratic process to produce a budget has ground to a halt as democrat senators have fled their responsibilities in governance and their residence in the state in order to prevent a quorum that would allow budget debate and passage.  The public unions have brought thousands of angry demonstrators to the capital day after day to obstruct and intimidate the legislators and governor.  They have called Walker a “hitler”, a “stalin”, compared him to apes, raised death threats and other violent invectives, screamed and chanted, and accused him of governing differently than he campaigned.

     Throughout it all, Walker has been serene and resolute.  He has asked for debate within the rules of the legislature. He has asked for democratic process.  Above all he has asked for seriousness in both facts and solutions.  He has broken no campaign promises because he is not about promises but rather principles of democracy’s actions.  The government represents all the people.  The government does not exist to profit its own.   The government exists to create equality of opportunity, not to guarantee it.  The government is graded by and responsible to, its electorate.  The government is not about special interests, but rather maintanence of standards.  The government exists to assure the protection of individual rights not collective security.  The principles ride herd on him , and he does not concern himself with immediate pulse of the day in making his decisions.

     He is exactly what people thought they were voting for when they realized no one else was going to willing to potentially fall on the career sword in order to find long term fiscal sanity. Scott Walker is one of those special people.  He is the Man in the Arena.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

                Theodore Roosevelt    “Citizenship in a Republic”   June 1910

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The Virginian

     In our more cynical, superficial age we find it hard to imagine the set of circumstances that would lead a man to risk all that he had, and give up the greater portion of his life, to an idea.   279 years ago today, such a man was born in the colony of Virginia, and his indomitable life quest almost single-handedly made possible the American Experiment.  There was no expectation in early life of his sacrificial nature, borne to a prominent Virginia family,  and he could have settled in to a life of plantation farming and land acquisition that was his family’s mantra.  Something restless and animal was part of his makeup , however, and his early journeys into the wilderness to survey land created a unique need not seen in other family members.  This man, George Washington, was tuned into a special stereophonic muse that was characterized both by the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Possibility.  His forays into the vast American continent began to coalesce for him that this particular land was special, and the capacity of each individual man special, within it.  He began to seek positions that would both make possible the maximization of who he was, and steadily, the risks he would need to face to achieve fulfillment.

     The young adult Washington showed a warrior instinct.  He was named the military leader of an attachment that was to derive the position of the competing French in the Ohio country coveted by both the British and French superpowers, and managed in a short time time get himself involved in both a massacre of French soldiers near present day Pittsburgh, and later a complementary catastrophic massacre of British soldiers in the ill fated Braddock expedition to eject the French.  The sequence of events showed Washington to be aggressive, impetuous, and in a trait glorified later in life, unconscionably brave and seemingly immune to battle chaos or bullets.  The controversies of these events left the British and the American politicians with different impressions of the Virginian Washington.  The British saw him as inferior to the British officer ideal with his Americanized instincts for cagey warfare over stand and shoot soldiering.  The Americans saw him as an example of individual creativity and persistence.  Both concepts were of Washington, but did not completely describe him, to those who later felt they knew how  the “true” Washington in battle would respond.

     A leap forward in time to 1775, and the continental congress is desirous of a leader that holds both warrior skills and revolutionary ideals in his make-up. There was frankly little “in-house” experience to chose from, but Washington recognized before anyone that the warrior leader would have to a special hybrid. He would need to be able to commune with the common man who would ultimately provide a volunteer force that would need to be willing to sacrifice and  die for abstract ideas, and would have to project a consistent warrior bearing and confidence that would assure all that taking on the most powerful military on earth and winning was not the ludicrous proposition it seemed.  He played these two roles to perfection, and retrospectively, was the unique persona for the impossible task.

     The revolutionary war years of 1775 to 1783 were epitomized by the crushing reality of the sacrifices necessary by men like Washington to achieve the miracle of independence.  The challenges were overwhelming.  He was required to fight the greatest military force in the world with a rag tag army of citizen soldiers with little military training and limited resources.  He was challenged  time and time again to rebuild this volunteer army as deferments ran out, or men simply gave up on the intolerable nature of it all.  He was expected to maintain a continental strategy with troops who were thinking that their home to defend was their own state and not necessarily the “foreign” state to which they were forced to defend.  He was forced to defend his actions in defeat after painful defeat against individual politicians who thought they knew better and refused to monetarily support the cause or mandate the troops.  He did this all continuously for eight years with a price on his head, away from his home, under atrocious conditions, and with the foreknowledge that defeat meant for him certain death and loss of all that he had.   He faced all these enormous obstacles – and he won.

     When it came time years later to select a chief executive that would form the initial government of the United States, the selection again turned to one man, the Virginian, Washington.  He was selected not for any impassioned rhetorical brilliance or acknowledged philosophical depth, but again, because he was the single individual every competing interest group felt they could trust.  He was selected for his acknowledged ownership of the American Ideal through the worst of times, and his willingness as a man, to give up power when it was his to take.  As the first President of these United States he set for all time the standard that the office, not the man, the Constitution, not the trappings, were the key ingredients of the American Experiment.

     On his birthday, at a time when mediocrity of character and lack of in-depth understanding of what makes this American Experiment work frequently desires to inhabit the office of President, our first president, the Virginian, stands forever, like a colossus.

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Sic Semper Tyrannus?

     In December, 1989, with almost inconceivable suddenness, the dictator who had ruled Romania with an iron fist for 34 years, Nicolae Ceausescu, in the space of one week fell from emperor king to the wrong end of a firing squad. His was the last thugocracy government to collapse in the spectacular year of Revolution that was 1989. Despite the domino like collapse of other authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe that year, Ceausescu confidently left the country for a trip to Iran, not recognizing the match for revolution that was struck in the city of Timisoara on December 18th over the simple act of attempted eviction of a Hungarian priest by the government for “inciting” ethnic divisions. Quickly joined by Romanian students, a brutal effort to violently  crush the demonstrations had exactly the opposite effect and within only two days had spiraled out of the government’s control. Ceausescu returned to find on December 21st a country he couldn’t possibly recognize, in full revolt and to his shock completely unafraid of him. His meager efforts to rally government support collapsed in hours and he was forced to flee, only to be turned over by police to a thrown together military tribunal that declared him an enemy of the people and executed him on December 25th, 1989.  One week,  from complete control, to complete collapse.

     So it appears the latin phrase, Sic Semper Tyrannus, “thus always to Tyrants” has come to roost again in the year of Revolution  2011 in Libya.  Following a similar pattern to Romania, the spark of revolution appears to have been the relatively innocuous event of the government preventing people from inhabiting a long promised but unfinished housing development, but the flame was clearly fired from the spectacular revolutionary forces that are shaking northern Africa and the Middle East, with despots in Tunisia in January and Egypt in February rapidly driven from power, and the governments of Bahrain and Iran shaken by unrest.  Libya’s Ceausescu is Mu’ammar Quadaffi, a four decade dictator who has maintained rigid control over the oil rich country and has been a long standing supporter of radical Islamic groups and terrorists in other lands. In similar fashion to Ceausescu, Quadaffi seems to have completely misread recent events and his own vulnerable position, and by violently striking out against demonstrators, managed in a single week to explode his country and implode his dictatorial control.  Reports suggest that he has had to flee Libya to avoid his own capture and that his sons are struggling to hold a losing position in the capital of Tripoli. If true, the historical evidence that dictatorial control, no matter how imperial, is a mile wide and an inch deep, and only needs the right push to force collapse, must have the governments of Syria, North Korea, and Iran nervously scanning their horizons for similar signs of trouble.

     The year 2011 is proving to be a year of revolution on the epic level of  1989, but its outcome is considerably more murky in the advance of freedom.  The dark forces of a different kind of totalitarianism, those of islamofasciist extremism, lay in waiting like foxes at the hen house, to these newly freed countries with little complementary institutional structure for individual rights.  The Eastern European countries of 1989 succeeded at getting the tender sprouts of freedom to flower, but initially, it was quite unclear what would come out of the foment at that time.  The difference was the example of a United States and Europe that was comfortable in the promotion of democracy for the sake of the formation of republican government and positively intervened to  help determine the outcome.  A much more unsure United States and Europe exists today, and it is unclear if an determined leadership is available that is able to recognize the opportunity for the promotion of individual human rights for the Arab world, and assure that the fragile flame for this beleaguered part of the world is not rapidly extinguished.

     President Obama could take heed from a President that now appears visionary in his understanding of the forces of freedom at work in the Mid-East and beyond:

 

George W. Bush  United Nations Speech September 21, 2004

“For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability.  Oppression became common, but stability never arrived.  We must take a different approach. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful ,democratic nations.”

” The advance of liberty is the path to both a safer and better world”

“The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire can not be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the world, freedom will find a way.”

“We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terror in their midst. We know that free people embrace progress and life, instead of becoming recruits for murderous ideologies”