Public Victory: Re-Regulate the Banks

A new post in the “Public Victory” section:

6.30.2009/ Re-Regulate the Banks

A Post on Organization

I am trying to organize things a little differently at this site for two reasons. First, if I am going to begin posting on different topics, as has been the case thus far, then I need a hierarchy and way to distingush between topics. Second, I want to make things a little more user friendly so that people can quickly find what they want to read and sort through everything else.

This site has started seeing a steady flow of traffic in the statistics and I am grateful for that. Right now, I see it as an alternative to emailing what I think on any number of topics and a method which will allow responses for those who have an interest.

As you can see, there is a new “Public Victory” page. Keeping with the phrase that I am using as parameters to build this website, Private Virtue Toward Public Victory, I want to begin posting some ideas that I have had in the past that can be further refined and commented on in hopes that the ideas can be put toward conservative public policy victories.  The policies that will be discussed are going to be formulated with a number of concepts in mind. These concepts, each of which I will go into in more depth in forthcoming post, include: acknowledgement of scale and place, building individuals upward, and advancement toward peace.

Why Gov. Sanford’s Adultery Hurts Personally.

I was in a funk after learning that Governor Sanford had adulterated his marriage. The reason that Sanford’s admission has affected me greater than some of the other recent adulterous admission, such as Sens. Vitter and Ensign, has to do with something that I have been pondering a lot lately: role models and heroes.

I am happy to say, and maybe even a bit surprised with myself, that the first thing that came to my mind after learning of the disgusting mess was not Governor Sanford’s political career but his family. You see, I have been paying attention to Gov. Sanford for some time now. Even before the 2008 election, he had appeared a few times as a rising star on our country’s political stage. Being a feverish consumer of all things politics at times, I naturally researched his biography and family. “Perfect,” I thought to myself. “He seems like a real family man.” That was the first thing that struck me as devastating. Mr. Sanford is going to be blighted, damaged goods, if you will, in the eyes of his family. His reputation, his word, has most likely been damaged beyond repair with his four beautiful sons. Who will now be their role models for a representation of a good husband and father who can be faithful to both his bride and his children? Therefore my first instinct is to worry and pray for his family.

A Lack of Commonality

I was at Mass today, somewhat dressed up for today’s version of “dressed up,” business casual. About 50 others and I worshiped on the feast of Corpus Christi. I didn’t know it was the Feast of Corpus Christi until I got there. How could I know? I live in a world where it is a constant struggle just to carry out the most basic tenets of Christian Faith. Nothing going on in my life would have been able to alert me that it was the feast of Corpus Christi. What is worse, is that I don’t know that there could be anything I could have done aside from looking up and posting a church calendar in my room, which I now have done, to alert me to the Feast. What I am getting at is that living one’s daily life in the manner that I and many others do is a struggle of utmost difficulty. At the very core, it necessarily becomes a very lonely endeavor.

With all of this in mind, I began thinking in Mass about the extreme lack of commonality in our lives and I realized that that is the one void that gets to the center of most of my thinking. In the United States if you live a secular life, which most of us do in the sense that we do not realistically put God or our Faith in Him at the center of our lives, then the only commonality we all share is that we have nothing in common at all. At first this seems impossible to overcome. However, there remains Hope on a very basic and natural level for any Christian attempting, however poorly, to live their life as a Christian. That ray of Hope is the belief that all humans share a common dispossession towards God. If there is anything that we can work to build on, it must be this.

Would the Real Liberals Please Stand Up?

“People are living their lives like liberals” was the theme of one of my last posts. It could have been better put in Thatcheresque terms of “People are living their lives as if the facts of life are liberal.” At any rate, a question that conservatives must ask is who and what we are opposing. In this sense, are liberals really living their lives like the liberals of the past? During the height of the Vietnam War, John Lennon (and a whole bunch of others) sang “All we are saying is give Peace a Chance.” He sang it over and over again, and assumingly he meant it. He thought that music had the power to encourage his form of love and peace, and the radicals of the 1960’s and 1970’s were steadfast in turning against hypocrisy and “the man.”

Conservativism and “the Environment”

A recent quip made by a friend of mine brought to mind the current problem of how we as conservatives treat the ongoing conversation about “the environment.” I had turned on a television program that was highlighting the great technologies that NASA had employed in order to get two small “rovers” to last longer than ever imagined in their quest to explore the planet Mars. The cost of the exploration and all that goes with it, let alone the rovers themselves, was no doubt obscene.  However, the comment by my friend was made toward the end of the program after the designers of the rovers were done proudly explaining that with no weather around to destroy the rovers, they could outlast even humans. (I find the possibility of this doubtful for any number of reasons including that an asteroid strike would likely burn the rovers and send unrecognizable particles flying into the atmosphere.)

My friend’s comment was along the lines that we were now polluting other planets. While in my arrogant omnipotence I quickly retorted “What were we really worried about Mars for anyways, it’s not like we’ll ever need it or live there,” it struck me today as highlighting the arrogance of humans, like myself, to separate themselves from nature. It also struck me as a perfect example of living by the liberalism that is so pervasive in both political parties today.

Lets Stop “Playing by liberal Rules”

Over at The Next Right, Chris Bannon has some great insights on how we as conservatives are often playing by liberal rules. I like his comparison to the movie Big Daddy. Check it out:

Conservatives should stop playing by liberal rules.

Presenting an Actual Alternative

A dear friend of mine pointed out that my thoughts yesterday may come off as somewhat harsh to pretty much everyone reading them. In asking what I was trying to accomplish through the essay, my friend pointed out something that I did not make plain yesterday, but which I meant to. Mainly, the arguments that I am making are about conservatives, not liberals. In many ways this could be seen as me attacking my own side, however I don’t think of it so much as attacking as I would like to refer to it as constructively building up. The arguments that I am making would not make much sense to a liberal at all. Modern liberalism might as well be called modern relativism and therefore there can be no “good” or “best.” Directives toward liberal chosen ends of course exist in liberal agendas, but are argued with the underlying claim that “everyone agrees,” and therefore there need be no discussion of what is good or best. (For a very obvious example, take a look at the liberal line on “global warming”).
In a sense, the liberal leg to stand on represents no leg at all. Liberalism necessarily is eventually defined as the equalizing of all cultures, beliefs, and lines of thought. Therefore the liberals stand on something, but that something is literally made up of an equality of “nothing.” There can be no best, no good, because all individual ideas of the best, all individual “goods” are equal.

Up From Here

Note: It seems to me that the current conversation about the conservatism and even a “conservatism that can win again” is devoid of any attempt at building people up to their proper place in the world. As William Voegeli has just written in the Claremont Review of Books of the “Wilderness Years,” there is a rift in the movement, even moreseo than in the GOP, between what he calls “traditionalists” and “reformers.” I fear however, that the problems of conservatism are deeper than that. One of the reasons that conservatism is not a viable argument at the present moment is that for the vast majority of Americans, an ever increasing liberal society has tricked them into living their lives like liberals. Far from Margaret Thatcher’s oft repetated claim that “the facts of life are conservative,” most Americans, and a miserable number of the youth, live their lives as if the facts of life are liberal. As such, I will begin my blog posting and continued commentary on American life with a brief overview of how “living as a liberal” plays out.

If you were to look around at what society recognizes as acceptable behavior today in the United States, I think reasonable people would be forced to agree that what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said over 15 years ago about defining deviancy down has proved to be even more true of liberalism than we could have imagined. Try it. Look around. A few examples:

In just 10 years, the American Broadcasting Company, owned by the Disney Corporation, has taken us from TGIF with a host of quality family entertainment to “Dirty, Sexy, Money” and “Desperate Housewives.” This exemplifies the national media’s attempt to define deviancy down toward the very lowest of common denominators. Housewives are desperate we are told from the title. “Desperate for what?” a family may wonder, tuning in at 9pm on any given night for some family time at the tube. A few minutes provides all the answers of course: sex, the lowest denominator of all. This can be seen as a way that the national elites want us to perceive ourselves; how do we really think of ourselves

One of the best indicators of how one perceives oneself mentally is one’s dress, one’s choice of clothing. Once, in what seems like a fairy tale, but what was really not that long ago, men, and women, took care that they were not seen in public dressed carelessly. It showed a respect for the dignity of oneself, and a distinctiveness that exemplified the ability of humanity at its best to represent order. Far from the claims of many of the cultural relativists today that those periods were ones of plainness and conformity, there were many more differences and celebration of uniqueness when something could actually be exotic or unique. Today, to be unique is to care about one’s dress at all. The real conformity is the vast majority of the population in the United States that walks around in blue jeans and un-tucked T’s. Again, liberalism is at work. Defining dress down in the most slovenly of ways, the man who has it all dresses like he who has nothing, and he who has nothing has nothing to gain by attempting to define his outward appearance upwards. There is no exotic dress, because all dress is equal. Jeans are jeans whether they are purchased at Armani or K-Mart. More than likely, they are both made by the same person in China working on two dollars a day, wearing blue-jeans while he works.

Speaking of that Chinese, or Vietnamese laborer, they are increasingly Christian churchgoers. Americans once went to Christian churches too. Every Sunday morning, the vast majority of Americans would wake up early and drudge off to the local Sunday Service, of course in their Sunday best. (A small sacrifice indeed, compared with that which Christ made).

No matter, however. As Americans, we are free to do as we please on Sunday, including free to dispense with old laws about keeping holy the Sabbath. With nothing Holy and with no One to give Thanks to for our secure place in a troubled world, we are left to do with Sunday what we please, which for men, usually means Sunday football. (Some replacement!) Every Sunday, we get up by 12 noon to watch the pre-game shows and get the house ready for our buddies to come over and cheer on our favorite team. With all the bandwagon-ing that goes on we can’t even all cheer for the same team most of the time because the guy next door (or maybe even us) began rooting for the team who won the Superbowl when we were 10. We’ve been diehard fans ever since though! And live and die with our teams we do though.

Without anything else to place a lost Faith in on Sundays, we place our “faith” in the quarterback, or the coach, or the wide receiver who just beat a rap for buying cocaine. In place of singing at Sunday services, we scream at a screen (HD-54 inch, no doubt, with Mirage Nanoset home theater speakers to boot), where men who can’t hear us, who we will never meet, and who get paid millions of dollars (money we will likely never make) could care less about how we think they should have seen the hole that opened up through the offensive line on the other side of the field on the last play. Don’t worry, just sit back and have a few more beers with your “buds.” (Remember those guys you don’t even share a common team with.) Once it would have been deviant just to stay away from a Christian Church on a Sunday, let alone get drunk. (In a former time if someone were to be drunk on a Sunday, most would have the dignity to drink alone so as to not allow others to see it). Faith defined down indeed. At least the young Chinese man making your sweatpants has something to believe in.

So we go on like this: devoid of values, devoid of self respect, devoid of real Faith. Conservatives are often equally guilty in the complacency that the past few generations have shown toward this trend in deviancy. Any conservatism that comes from our time in the wilderness must again convince people, and live by example in showing them that the facts of life are as Margaret Thatcher says they are.

Doing Things Differently

I am going to start doing some things differently here at Commonwealth Foward. Due to a lack of resources, mostly people, time, and funding, I will not be able to maintain the coverage that I had previously kept up in terms of the news in the Northeast Region and such. Therefore, I am going to start posting on pretty much what I feel like and see if people start reading. I hope to eventually make Commonwealth Forward into something larger, but for now, this is going to be the place to read the thoughts of Kevin Lawrence Francis Hall, on many of the current goings-on, but mostly on the conservative movement in particular. And Here We Go…