I promised to keep you updated on our government’s radio ads. In the latest, the Department of Justice offers you its benevolent services for any problem you might be experiencing with school bullies.
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I may not be a good American.
I have never watched a Super Bowl or an NBA championship, never been to Las Vegas, never willingly listened to rap, hip-hop, or heavy metal music. San Francisco strikes me not as beautiful but as bleak, ugly, dirty, and alien. I feel more at home in many places in Europe than I do in New York City or Los Angeles. I like the French and find most Germans very uncongenial—too much like a certain type of American—intellectually and ethically challenged self-important bullies. (Think Earl Warren, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett.)
I do not own a cell phone. I have never been to Aspen. I do not think equality in education and excellence in education are the same thing, as most Americans seem to believe.
I think Thomas Fleming is the best social commentator and moral philosopher in America today. I think Rush Limbaugh and all of his imitators are ignorant, vulgar demagogues and a danger to their country. As far as I am concerned Walter Cronkite never was an honest man, much less “the most trusted man in America.” I don’t think William F. Buckley Jr. is all that brilliant.
I have never thought that any occupant of the executive mansion in the federal district was “my” president. I do not like to shop and think we have more than enough malls and superstores, not to mention golf courses that use up good farm land and water. I am seriously annoyed every time I see long rows of empty parking spaces fraudulently and illegally confiscated by the federal government with its “disabled” sign.
I don’t think Islam is a religion of peace. However, it would be a lot less of a problem if they were over there instead of over here. And if we were over here instead of over there.
I have known quite a few college presidents, vice-presidents, provosts, deans, etc. In my observation not one of them had any real scholarship or true interest in learning or in students. What they had was an ability to bamboozle the supposedly savvy but actually petty, vain, and clueless tycoons and politicians who were trustees. American education is nothing to be proud of—at any level. Its primary achievement, besides lining the pockets of shysters and perpetuating Political Correctness, is to alienate and demoralize intelligent students.
I am not glad that the U.S. government under the Republican party succeeded in its brutal, fascistic war of conquest of the Southern people. I did not cry or feel any tribulation when I heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and I never thought at any time that Jacqueline Kennedy was either attractive or gracious. I do feel sorrow and tribulation, however, that fifty-four American women have been killed in Iraq. And for hundreds of young men whose lives ended before they had hardly begun. Not for nothing but for less than nothing. I am certain that a regime in which rich men living in safety send poor women to war is unworthy of allegiance. And nourishes the seeds of its own destruction.
(By the way, I have been looking over the American dead in the present Babylonian expedition. There are very, very few who come from the portion of the Union north and west of Pennsylvania.)
I don’t think that Boston is the fount of all good things in American history. Quite the contrary. My favourite Presidents are John Tyler and Franklin Pierce. I am certain beyond any doubt that the domestic slavery of antebellum America was far from being one of the worst crimes in mankind’s long, sad history or even the worst crime in American history. I am equally certain, despite government and “expert” pronouncements, that antebellum Southern slavery is not the cause of social pathologies in urban America today.
I do not think Americans are uniquely virtuous and enjoy the special favour of God.
I fear I am a bad American. But I note that commentators on the present war keep remarking that America has never had a war on its own soil. Oh, really? Maybe I am not a bad American but no American at all.
SOURCE: From www.chroniclesmagazine.org
