Toss out sex roles and “all you’ve got left is a blob”

Joseph Campbell – with the help of Bill Moyers (who was ordained as a Baptist pastor in the 1950s) – led many people astray with his “follow your bliss” mythology and his trashing of monotheism and the Bible.

There was one area, however, where Campbell (who died in 1987) stayed tethered to commonsense tradition:

"Women are losing the appreciation for their own domestic life… They are turning it all over to the state and the schools… We have unisex barbershops.  It’s ridiculous because the whole energy of life depends on polarity and when you give that up all you’ve got left is a blob."

China forced to apologize for shameful treatment of mother

Violently subjecting a young mother -- seven months into her pregnancy -- to an abortion has brought condemnation on the Chinese government.  The article also gives some background on the role that recently exiled dissident Chen Guangcheng (pictured with his wife and son) has played in protesting the one-child policy with its train of abuses.

Some Democratic feminists in our country are ramping up their bizarre rhetoric, as they hope to incite a new pride in women who have aborted their children. 

("In his Aug. 29, 1996, speech to the Democratic National Convention, President Bill Clinton said ‘abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare. That's why I helped establish and support a national effort to reduce out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and that is why we must promote adoption.’ The convention attendees responded with enthusiastic applause.")

Women saints who called men to act like men

Catherine of Siena (14th century) chastised the Pope to quit Avignon and return to Rome; and Joan of Arc, in the following century, stirred the men of France to finally show some backbone in defending “la patria.”

There is a fascinating section in the autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux where she recounts her stint as novice mistress in the Carmelite convent.  She saw the absolute necessity for sometimes employing a ‘cold face’:
 

"I have said that I learned a lot by teaching others.  I discovered that every soul has almost the same difficulties and that there is yet a vast difference between individual souls – a difference which means that each one must be dealt with differently.  There are some with whom I must make myself small and show myself willing to be humiliated by confessing my own struggles and defeats, for then they themselves easily confess their own faults and are pleased that I understand them through my own experience.  To be successful with others, firmness is necessary.  I must never go back on what I have said, and to humiliate myself would be regarded as weakness.

"God has given me the grace of having no fear of a fight.  I will do my duty at any cost."

A sophomore’s credo on his bumper

This morning, while stopped at a red light, a college kid pulled into the traffic lane next to me.  As he accelerated, I noticed his bumper sticker: “Subvert the dominant paradigm.”

The prose from our over-educated elites is frustrating… but not nearly so much as witnessing the lock-step fealty on campus to orthodox liberalism.

A few years back, the ‘Chronicle of Higher Education’ reported on a study that found about 80 percent of college faculty voted for John Kerry in his presidential bid of 2004.  The president of Harvard at the time, Lawrence Summers, remarked that no social science teacher at a PhD-granting institution admitted voting for President Bush that year: “There is an overwhelming tilt toward the progressive side.”



UPDATE:   David Brooks does a superb job of explaining why eternal rebellion and semi-anarchy is a dead-end.  Our generation -- deeply cynical about just authority -- has gone too long without thinking "properly about how power should be used to bind and build."

Flat-out fratricide

In the early 1990s Jesse Jackson addressed a group of black government workers: “We talked 30 years ago about genocide.  It’s now fratricide.  At this point, the Klan is not nearly the threat that your next-door neighbors are.”

Dinesh D’Souza has plenty of captivating material in The End of Racism.  He reminds us that, back when John Kennedy was elected president, almost 80 percent of black families were headed by married couples.

The ever-moderate Spike Lee is quoted as ripping a senior black official in the Bush Sr. administration who pushed race-neutral scholarships: “[He’s an Uncle Tom who should be] dragged into the alley and beaten with a Louisville slugger.”

But the reason I picked up D'Souza's book was to check out the chapter on the chasm between the philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois (the first black to receive a postgraduate Harvard degree).  Du Bois dismissed the proponent of industrial education and personal discipline as the original Uncle Tom!

Booker Washington knew that political agitation would not save the black man:

"Back of the ballot, he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence and character.  No race without these elements can permanently succeed… Whether he will or not, a white man respects a Negro who owns a two-story brick house."

[Picture in your mind the thousands of white customers over the decades who harbored disdain for the "yellow race" – who, nevertheless, chose to walk into Chinese take-out restaurants and pull greenbacks out of their wallet.]

D’Souza says that Du Bois – who spoke French and German, and sported gloves and a cane – was an unabashed elitist: “The Negro race is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”  But even he, at times, had to admit the obvious:

"A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills."

Though it hasn’t worked out very well in practice, Du Bois was convinced that “the rights we are clamoring for are those that will enable us to do our duties.”

Booker Washington wanted to transcend the identification with race; Du Bois embraced it.  Both men "emphasized the impediments of white racism, [but] Washington also considered the defects of black culture."

The chapter ends with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"We must not let the fact that we are the victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives.  We must not use our oppression as an excuse for mediocrity and laziness.  Our crime rate is far too high.  Our level of cleanliness is frequently far too low.  We are too often loud and boisterous, and spend far too much on drink.  By improving our standards here and now, we will go a long way toward breaking down the arguments of the segregationist… The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation."

[To find out which state leads the nation in black-on-black murders, go here.]