Category: PEOPLE WE SHOULD KNOW

    “Greatness, generally speaking, is an unusual quantity of a usual quality grafted upon a common man.”    William Allen White, journalist

     The man that was Norman Borlaug was precisely the individual who William Allen White ,the Kansas journalist of the early part of the twentieth century, must have been reflecting upon when he articulated the above quotation.  Borlaug was the simplest and humblest of Midwestern men, but he probably saved more lives than almost any other individual of the past hundred years.  You might therefore ask why you have probably never heard of him.  The reason would be that his great achievement rests in the quiet scientific backwater of food science, not the most dynamic of fields, but to the estimated billion people whose fruitful lives were made possible by Norman Borlaug, ultimately a incalculably important one.  With the vote of a billion people, Norman Borlaug has earned his position of one the RAMPARTS People We Should Know.

     Paul Ehrlich wrote a menacing book in 1968, The Population Bomb, that prophesied that the world’s exploding population would soon overwhelm the planet’s capacity to feed humanity and that the near term future would be one of mass starvation and resultant violence.  Though taken as gospel for decades after despite progressive evidence to the contrary (similar to global warming hysteria), Ehrlich was unaware that at the time of his treatise, Norman Borlaug had already done much to unravel his fateful predictions. 

     Borlaug was born and raised in the little Norwegian community of Saude, Iowa in 1904 where he was instilled with the midwestern ethic of self determination and hard work by his farmer parents and relatives.  The product of a one room school education, he became the first in his family to attend college, graduating from the University of Minnesota with a forestry degree. The pain and hunger of the Great Depression left an indelible mark upon him, and he never forgot the effect of lack of available food on an individual’s capacity to think, function, and achieve. Remembering an undergraduate lecture on plant pathology that suggested genetic tools to alleviate parasitic rust from plants, he determined to return to Minnesota to complete a PhD in Plant Pathology, and he spent the rest of his life, formulating food production solutions on the stimulus of that brief lecture exposure.  Determined to defend his country in World War II, Borlaug found himself isolated from the war because of his scientific skill set, and was instead sent to laboratory work to work on mundane material science such as glues and adhesives. 

     With the war coming to an end he intensified his desire to study food production, and was asked to use his knowledge of rusts on wheat to help Mexico with a progressive food supply problem.  With 14 years of intensive and laborious work, Borlaug eventually achieved through thousands and thousands of genetic breeding experiments what was thought impossible, rapidly resilient wheat plants with higher grain yields and rust immunity. These semi-dwarf hybrids had shorter, thicker stalks that could support a larger head of grain, yet significant resistance in multiple climes to the killer fungal rust that had obliterated crop yields in tropical climes. Mexico under Borlaug’s revolutionary work went from below subsidence grain production to a net exporter of grain.  Borlaug was not done with his sacrificial work.  He soon spread the knowledge and the wheat varietals to India and Pakistan, warring countries in the sixties that were felt hopelessly inefficient growers to ever be able to feed their burgeoning populations. The two countries agreed on almost nothing, except Borlaug, and soon were finding the capacity to feed their own people.  Perhaps coincidentally the hot war cooled between the two neighbors as their hungry populations became satisfactorily fulfilled.  In particular, it allowed India, to begin to focus its energies on the inate potential of its population and played no small part in India’s current position as a nascent economic superpower.

     Borlaug’s Green Revolution had eliminated in fact what the elitist guessers had fantasized, that mankind was not capable of addressing both human and environmental concerns, and ultimately prosper and flourish.  The current arguments regarding climate change and the need to “suppress” man to “save” the world rings no different than Ehrlich’s incorrect tome. Borlaug himself had a telling quote about elitism, stating,

“If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things”.  NYT 02.13.09

     Borlaug lived into his nineties, bringing similar tactics to grain production in Africa and East Asia as he did for Mexico and Central Asia, and tirelessly promoted the capacity of the poor to become self supportive and self reliant through the power of science.  He earned the Nobel Prize for Peace and the Presidential Freedom Award, but his greatest testament was the devotion to his name in countries to whom the “ugly American” tag comes easily. Norman Borlaug was no ugly American.  He was the American that brought the power of life to a starving world, and the chance for a life of individual freedom and potential to a billion people. Now that’s defending the RAMPARTS…

 

     The 111th Congress recently elected and positioned to take office in January 2011 will seat potentially the most influential and powerful Wisconsin politician on the national stage ever and the most recognizable the since Senator  Joe McCarthy in the 1950’s and Fighting Bob LaFolette in the 1920’s.  He is a relatively unassuming six term congressman from Wisconsin’s 1st District named Paul Ryan, and he will with the placement of the new congress assume the chairmanship of the powerful Committee on the Budget, which frames the expenditures of the United States and crucially entitlement spending.  At only 40 years of age, and already recognized as a national resource and creative intellect on budget issues, he will be a progressive star on the national stage, and obvious member of Rampart’s People We Should Know.

     Ryan is an economic wunderkind who has already been identified for many years since his mid twenties as a particularly sharp student of budgetary issues in Washington.  Only six years after graduation from Miami Ohio University he managed to convince a predominantly democratic district in Wisconsin of his mature political grasp, winning a surprise election in 1998 and successfully holding the seat ever since.  He has progressively come into prominence for his measured and articulate debate style, his encyclopedic understanding of the byzantine US budget process, and his market oriented proposals for radical overhaul of the failing United States tax and entitlement system in his revolutionary and comprehensive Roadmap for America’s Future .  This plan articulated a logical means of preserving American enterprise and standard of living while dramatically curtailing the deficit spending in out years producing strangulating national debt.  The seriousness of the plan has been confirmed by the howls of protest from progressives that see it as a threat to their dreams of a European style social compact for America.  President Obama himself referred to it as a serious plan, while laying out an alternative accelerated spending process at complete juxtaposition to Ryan’s plan.  The two protagonists came intellectually head to head at the debate prior to Obama’s budget destroying healthcare proposal in its run to becoming law, and it was at this White House summit that a national audience first saw the tremendous skills and intellect of this congressman, as he methodically took apart Obama’s plan for the economic debacle it would create, piece by piece:

     The spectacular performance put Ryan on the map and he has wasted no time in positioning himself as the conservative intellectual alternative to Obama’s idealistic progressivism. The November election with the recapture of the House of Representatives by Republicans places Mr. Ryan on the perfect stage to define US budget policy as chairman of the powerful Budget Committee. He has pre-meditatively in brilliant and politically savvy fashion already taken the offensive with a bi-partisan proposal in conjunction with Clinton economic advisor Alice Rivlin proposing a more sane alternative plan for Medicare entitlements compared to Obama’s healthcare act that promises to create real havoc with “inevitability” arguments of Obama’s hastily through together health impulses. The sky is the limit for this articulate and creative politician and he is bound to have to fight off overtures for national office in the coming years. The next two years of Paul Ryan are going to be a very interesting act to watch, and the future look of the United States and its willingness to preserve the tenets of market forces that brought it to the pinnacle of western civilization’s economic leadership will be very much defined by this Wisconsin defender of the Ramparts.

     There remains in liberal circles the ongoing tired mythic argument as to whether an individual can hold “conservative” views and still be perceived as intellectually intelligent, as if anybody holding “conservative” views needs or wants the annointive stamp of liberal intellectual approval.  The liberal mainstream’s conservative intellectual icon was always  William Buckley, Yale graduate, friend of liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, author, founder of the conservative literary digest National Review, and most identified with their acceptance,  conservative foil interviewer and debater on The Firing Line on the “”above the fray” outlet for liberal-speak, National Public Television.  Buckley epitomized the emblematic presence of the intellectual – graduate of an “accepted” school, erudite, articulate in the classical sense, and capable of hobnobbing at parties of the intellectual elite.  Certainly, they had to painfully overlook his early and consistent support of Ronald Reagan and that shopowner’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher,  but in a sense he was safe, because as far as they could tell, he was one of them, and he was the only one intellectual conservative in a sea of “dolts”.

     Mark Steyn is the modern answer to what is intellectual conservatism and a important  presence in the ongoing ramparts list of people we should know.  He is an anathema to the traditional liberalist view of accepted attributes of an intellectual.  He is a Canadian citizen who lives in the United States,  a profoundly well versed intellectual who quit school at age 18, a respected journalist without a journalism degree,  and an in-depth commentator on art and cultural issues without the typical liberal credentials associated with the humanities.  Schooled in the sharp and concise journalism of Fleet Street British tabloid style, he is very likely the most effective writer of the three hundred to a thousand word essay in journalism today.  The style is an enjoyably clear, acerbic, satirical, consise and logical tome that captures the reader into the argument regardless of the reader’s personal opinions on the subject.   Steyn has written brilliantly on subjects as diverse as Broadway musicals, obituaries, political analysis, and cultural trends in outlets as diverse as the National Review, Macleans, the Jerusalem Post, and the Atlantic Monthly magazine, all with preservation of the witty style and probing intellect that defines him.

    He has been fearless in the defense of the tenets of western civilization and is best known for the New York Times and Amazon best-selling book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It defining the trends and effects of islamic population growth and extremist culture on western society and cultural tenets.  His strong defense of western  ideals in the face of islamic cultural intolerance expressed in a Maclean’s article in 2008 led to an attempt of an entities of bureaucracy called the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal to review his right of free speech against the perceived “insults” alleged to have been received by the Canadian Islamic Congress.  Steyn has not backed down an inch on Canadian governmental  hypocrisy of “holding a tribunal “over his right to point out the intolerance and discrimination in an intolerant and discriminatory islamic culture.  He is the singular most effective voice in western society today for the honest and in-depth discussion of the collision with of the bedrock western tenets of individual freedom,  free expression, and tolerance with fundamentalist Islam.

     Mark Steyn is one of many publicly accepted voices today of intellectual conservatism once held solely by Mr. Buckley.  He is another example that the modern defender of the ramparts of western civilization’s fundamental values of freedom, tolerance, individual endeavour, and intellectual license is , increasingly, a conservative voice.

     The President of the Czech Republic is a defender of the ramparts of civilization and the inaugural member of the new ROC category, People We Should Know.  Vaclav Klaus is the 69 year old Czech president first elected in 2003 and re-elected in 2008 who has made it his vocation to speak his mind in a very libertarian and free-wheeling mode.  This has shocked the staid establishment of the European bureaucratic elite that have opined for a singular top down voice for European political and societal correctness for the past 60 years based on a socialist model, but Klaus has withstood the pressure to conform.  At a time when the socialist democracies of the traditional western power centers of Europe are creaking under the burden of mandated regulations of the European Union and the sclerotic addiction of their populations to public entitlements, Vaclav Klaus and like minded politicians from eastern European governments in Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, and Georgia are immersing themselves in the freer expression and experimentation of their more recent, hard won freedoms, and questioning the wisdom of following in the economic footsteps of the European establishment.  

     Klaus is a particularly vocal skeptic of two European political establishment philosophical mantras, European political unity and anthropomorphic global warming.  Klaus is a university trained economist who finds the lack of diversity and competition in the regulation laden EU economic model as stultifying and inevitably damaging to the individual aspirations of free market enterprise in the developing economies of eastern Europe.  He remains an opponent of the Lisbon Treaty, an attempt of European Union countries to codify constitutionally the social regulatory model of the EU to take precedence over local elected officials.  Klaus , the libertarian, finds it an affront to free action and a frankly unhealthy economic process.  He eventually signed the treaty to prevent the Czech Republic from being labelled the outcast that prevented passage, but remains convinced that the theories espoused by his economic hero Friedrich Hayak remain the salvation to a growing European answer to the competition provided by America, Brazil, India, and China.   On the issue of global warming as a phenomena driven by man made factors, he is an even more vociferous critic.  He has said that serious scientific review provides little support for the projections of the global warming scientific establishment, and is a direct assault on the sovereignty of the individual, designed for the solitary purpose of conforming people’s habits and forcing a socialist economic system through that conformity.  He feels strongly as a survivor of communist times in his country that radical environmentalism is the new weapon for leftest elements to infuse irreversible societal mandates , achieving the control of capitalist economies at a global scale only dreamt about by their communist forebears.

     President Klaus has brought to focus the civilized concept of freedom of thought and expression that is the foundation of the western ideal.  Love him or hate him, his intelligent, cogent, and incisive opinions guarantee that there still resonates in Europe the love of the intellectual free thinker, and with it, the hope that Europe might yet still escape from the worst elements of the socialist economic harness it has placed upon itself.