Curtis Dahlgren
The Cult of Death and the "Heroic measures" issue: The ultimate differentiation
By Curtis Dahlgren
"To the Law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them; and they [shall be] hungry, and it shall come to pass that . . they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward . . . Should not a people seek unto their God?" — Isaiah
"I have found a great hunger in America for a spiritual revival; for a belief that law must be based on a higher law; for a return to traditions and values we once had." — Ronald Reagan
LIKE A ROCK, CHEVY SOLD OUT TO THE UAW AND UNCLE SAM. LIKE A BOIL, THE "GOVERNMENT-RUN" DEBATE IS COMING TO A HEAD.
The Left's well-hidden worst fears have finally arrived. The next "march on Washington" isn't being heralded as another "civil rights" protest, but as a temper tantrum by the poorly educated (even Central America is rising up against King Chavez).
"These are farmers, the Common Clay of the Old West — you know, MORONS!"
— "BLAZING SADDLES" (excerpted from www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren October 27, 2003)
In 1969, a couple dropped off their kids at church and went to play golf. Later they asked what the preacher had talked about. "Sin," was the reply. "He's against it."
In 2009, a latch-key kid went to church and was asked later what the preacher had talked about. "Hatred," was the reply. "And she's against it!"
WELL, if they're so against it, then why do the people in Hollywood hate the Reagans? There are definable reasons. One reason is attitudinal: Reagan came from flyover country. By reading his farewell address to the United Nations in 1988, we can surmise some other reasons.
After covering foreign policy matters, President Reagan said his goodbyes by speaking like a grandfather to the third or fourth generation of his offspring. Can you picture this? It was a year before the Evil Empire crumbled and fell, and ol' Dutch spoke of the birth of the United States, how Franklin had called for prayers at the Constitutional Convention, and how Washington's farewell address had spoken of the source of liberty, how the case for inalienable rights and "the notion of conscience above compulsion" can only be made in the context of "higher law"! And he spoke of Family, "the first and most important unit of society."
"This morning, my thoughts go to her who gave me many things in life, but her most important gift was the knowledge of happiness and solace to be gained in prayer. . . . I think then of her and others like her in that small town in Illinois, gentle people who possessed something that those who hold positions of power sometimes forget to prize. No one of them could ever have imagined the boy from the banks of the Rock River would come to this moment and have this opportunity.
"But had they been told it would happen, I think they would have been a bit disappointed if I'd not spoken here for what they knew so well: that when we grow weary of the world and its troubles, when our faith in humanity falters, it is then that we must seek comfort and refreshment of spirit in a deeper source of wisdom, one greater than ourselves."
The prophet Isaiah was very un-cool. He wrote:
"The ancient and the honorable, he is the head; and the prophet that teaches lies, he is the tail. For the leaders of the people cause them to err, and those who are led of them are destroyed . . .
"For wickedness burns as the fire; it shall devour the briers and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickness of the forest, and they shall mount up like the lifting up of smoke. Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire; no man shall spare his brother."
"Therefore the Lord will cut off head and tail, branch and rush, in one day . . . Therefore as the fire devours the stubble, and the flame consumes the chaff, so their root shall be rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust, because they have cast away the Law and despised the Word of the Holy One of Israel."
"I will look unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." — King David
WE NEED TO PRAY TO THE GOD OF OUR FATHERS WHILE THIS FIRE IS STILL CONFINED TO CALIFORNIA.
Instead, our naively arrogant "leaders" press on in their darkness. Sweet is now bitter, left is "right" — and the good guys are now the "bad guys." The cult of personality and death proclaims "no surrender" — come hell or low poll ratings. They even scold Christians for not being their brother's keeper!
None dare call it "Reparations," but their HELLth-care plan is nothing more than the Dr. Kevorkian HELLth plan on the Dr. Emmanuel P.R. plan.
SPIN IS "IN," BUT "T.P." STANDS FOR BOTH "TALKING POINTS" AND "TOILET PAPER" — USED TOILET PAPER.
Now when I bring up the culture of death to some professing Christians, they change the subject to the issue of "heroic medical procedures" (feeding tubes and the like) as if that were the end of the discussion. They are totally OBLIVIOUS to the threat of government-run HELLth-care rationing and/or the sanctity of human life. But to those of us who have studied history, we are totally familiar with the code-words for self-extinction:
"REDUCING COSTS"; "REALLOCATION OF RESOURCES"; "MEDICARE EFFICIENCY," ETC.
Even words such as "Relocation" and "Internment" have slithered into contemporary news accounts. The U.S. Army is actually advertising for "Specialist" personnel for "relocation." History buffs have been there, done that, if only vicariously — up until now!
THEY WARNED US ABOUT "S.A.R.S."!
The same people who removed the Ten Commandments from the court house lobby are now lobbying for more and more power for the Executive branch of government, and the new "Green jobs" czar is an avowed, admitted, Communist. It is no accident that the "Tsars" or "Czars" of Russia were replaced by COMMIS-SARS. The Administration now has more "czars" than you can shake a stick at (unelected Commissars).
It is no accident that their "approval rating" is down to somewhere between 42 and 45 percent, even as they call US "poorly informed"! They accuse us of using "scare tactics" even as they tell us that the oceans are going to rise nearly two feet unless we give them carte blanche approval for their "progressive" agenda for "the common good."
Who is calling WHOM poorly informed? "The greatest good for the greatest number" was a Hitlerian slogan, or didn't you know? The only question is whether they will force their way on — "damn the torpedoes and the people" — in their quest for power.
When "winning" at politics trumps principle, LOSING becomes inevitable.
I just made that up, but there's a lesson in there for both political parties right now! Study the history of the Whig party. The first Republican in the White House said that "Right makes might," but way too many Republicans now tell us that the "era of Lincoln is over." They have moved "beyond" that.
Study the demise of the Democrats after 1857. Study the history of every country taken over by totalitarianism. In Estonia, for example, one-third of the people were either taken to "internment camps" or exterminated. The Killing Fields of Cambodia were nothing but "harmless" relocation camps (following a botched war in which the U.S. tried to straddle the fence of "politically correct" fighting, and a token effort to contain totalitarianism).
The old Nihilists in Russia took more than 50 years to "win" — by claiming that Russia was in a "crisis." The CURE was worse than the "crisis."
Edmund Burke once said that sometimes we must "tolerate" some imperfection (which is preferable to chaos and revolution). But our modern nihilists who preach "tolerance" are trying to silence Christianity and dissent, and even "regulate" the Internet. They are "full of themselves" and their hope and "change."
"It was prettily devised of Aesop, 'The fly sat upon the axletree of the chariot-wheel and said, what a dust do I raise.'" — Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Whether dissent is patriotic or dissent is hooliganism depends on whether the politician is waxing or waning, I guess. But you get the point, I "hope"!
CONCLUSION
Some people just don't get it, because they don't know the American people, they really don't. They have either spent too much time in the Ivy League, or they've never had a real job in the real world and gotten their hands dirty (the great "unwashed" out there don't appreciate it when they are being talked down to by Great Teachers. They don't appreciate it when politicians say one thing and do another).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) used to say:
We were brothers all
In honour, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen . . .
In the People was my trust,
And in the virtues which mine eyes had seen . . .
Not in Utopia — subterranean fields, -
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, — the place where, in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
YES! We're talking "the real world" here, and many of our forefathers understood that much better than contemporary nihilists, revolutionaries, and quick-change artists. When the Beatles sang "Imagine" a world without religion, what were they thinking?
Wordsworth said, "Imagination, which, in truth, is but another name for absolute power"!
Ah yes — UTOPIA (where "everything" [except nothing] is "FAIRER"!
May God have mercy and save us from Utopia!!
P.S. For further reading, here are some of my most under-read but timely columns:
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/030928 [on life-devoid-of-value in Germany, beginning with the 1920s]
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/030921 ["Whom the gods wish to con, they first make illiterate"]
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/040221 ["America's nervous breakdown: Another legacy of the 60s"]
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/040229 ["Timing is everything" (on our second "civil" war — a culture war)]
PPS: In the "real world," Life is what YOU make it, not what Uncle Sam promises to make it.
© Curtis Dahlgren
September 5, 2009
"To the Law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them; and they [shall be] hungry, and it shall come to pass that . . they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward . . . Should not a people seek unto their God?" — Isaiah
"I have found a great hunger in America for a spiritual revival; for a belief that law must be based on a higher law; for a return to traditions and values we once had." — Ronald Reagan
LIKE A ROCK, CHEVY SOLD OUT TO THE UAW AND UNCLE SAM. LIKE A BOIL, THE "GOVERNMENT-RUN" DEBATE IS COMING TO A HEAD.
The Left's well-hidden worst fears have finally arrived. The next "march on Washington" isn't being heralded as another "civil rights" protest, but as a temper tantrum by the poorly educated (even Central America is rising up against King Chavez).
"These are farmers, the Common Clay of the Old West — you know, MORONS!"
— "BLAZING SADDLES" (excerpted from www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren October 27, 2003)
In 1969, a couple dropped off their kids at church and went to play golf. Later they asked what the preacher had talked about. "Sin," was the reply. "He's against it."
In 2009, a latch-key kid went to church and was asked later what the preacher had talked about. "Hatred," was the reply. "And she's against it!"
WELL, if they're so against it, then why do the people in Hollywood hate the Reagans? There are definable reasons. One reason is attitudinal: Reagan came from flyover country. By reading his farewell address to the United Nations in 1988, we can surmise some other reasons.
After covering foreign policy matters, President Reagan said his goodbyes by speaking like a grandfather to the third or fourth generation of his offspring. Can you picture this? It was a year before the Evil Empire crumbled and fell, and ol' Dutch spoke of the birth of the United States, how Franklin had called for prayers at the Constitutional Convention, and how Washington's farewell address had spoken of the source of liberty, how the case for inalienable rights and "the notion of conscience above compulsion" can only be made in the context of "higher law"! And he spoke of Family, "the first and most important unit of society."
"This morning, my thoughts go to her who gave me many things in life, but her most important gift was the knowledge of happiness and solace to be gained in prayer. . . . I think then of her and others like her in that small town in Illinois, gentle people who possessed something that those who hold positions of power sometimes forget to prize. No one of them could ever have imagined the boy from the banks of the Rock River would come to this moment and have this opportunity.
"But had they been told it would happen, I think they would have been a bit disappointed if I'd not spoken here for what they knew so well: that when we grow weary of the world and its troubles, when our faith in humanity falters, it is then that we must seek comfort and refreshment of spirit in a deeper source of wisdom, one greater than ourselves."
The prophet Isaiah was very un-cool. He wrote:
"The ancient and the honorable, he is the head; and the prophet that teaches lies, he is the tail. For the leaders of the people cause them to err, and those who are led of them are destroyed . . .
"For wickedness burns as the fire; it shall devour the briers and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickness of the forest, and they shall mount up like the lifting up of smoke. Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire; no man shall spare his brother."
"Therefore the Lord will cut off head and tail, branch and rush, in one day . . . Therefore as the fire devours the stubble, and the flame consumes the chaff, so their root shall be rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust, because they have cast away the Law and despised the Word of the Holy One of Israel."
"I will look unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." — King David
WE NEED TO PRAY TO THE GOD OF OUR FATHERS WHILE THIS FIRE IS STILL CONFINED TO CALIFORNIA.
Instead, our naively arrogant "leaders" press on in their darkness. Sweet is now bitter, left is "right" — and the good guys are now the "bad guys." The cult of personality and death proclaims "no surrender" — come hell or low poll ratings. They even scold Christians for not being their brother's keeper!
None dare call it "Reparations," but their HELLth-care plan is nothing more than the Dr. Kevorkian HELLth plan on the Dr. Emmanuel P.R. plan.
SPIN IS "IN," BUT "T.P." STANDS FOR BOTH "TALKING POINTS" AND "TOILET PAPER" — USED TOILET PAPER.
Now when I bring up the culture of death to some professing Christians, they change the subject to the issue of "heroic medical procedures" (feeding tubes and the like) as if that were the end of the discussion. They are totally OBLIVIOUS to the threat of government-run HELLth-care rationing and/or the sanctity of human life. But to those of us who have studied history, we are totally familiar with the code-words for self-extinction:
"REDUCING COSTS"; "REALLOCATION OF RESOURCES"; "MEDICARE EFFICIENCY," ETC.
Even words such as "Relocation" and "Internment" have slithered into contemporary news accounts. The U.S. Army is actually advertising for "Specialist" personnel for "relocation." History buffs have been there, done that, if only vicariously — up until now!
THEY WARNED US ABOUT "S.A.R.S."!
The same people who removed the Ten Commandments from the court house lobby are now lobbying for more and more power for the Executive branch of government, and the new "Green jobs" czar is an avowed, admitted, Communist. It is no accident that the "Tsars" or "Czars" of Russia were replaced by COMMIS-SARS. The Administration now has more "czars" than you can shake a stick at (unelected Commissars).
It is no accident that their "approval rating" is down to somewhere between 42 and 45 percent, even as they call US "poorly informed"! They accuse us of using "scare tactics" even as they tell us that the oceans are going to rise nearly two feet unless we give them carte blanche approval for their "progressive" agenda for "the common good."
Who is calling WHOM poorly informed? "The greatest good for the greatest number" was a Hitlerian slogan, or didn't you know? The only question is whether they will force their way on — "damn the torpedoes and the people" — in their quest for power.
When "winning" at politics trumps principle, LOSING becomes inevitable.
I just made that up, but there's a lesson in there for both political parties right now! Study the history of the Whig party. The first Republican in the White House said that "Right makes might," but way too many Republicans now tell us that the "era of Lincoln is over." They have moved "beyond" that.
Study the demise of the Democrats after 1857. Study the history of every country taken over by totalitarianism. In Estonia, for example, one-third of the people were either taken to "internment camps" or exterminated. The Killing Fields of Cambodia were nothing but "harmless" relocation camps (following a botched war in which the U.S. tried to straddle the fence of "politically correct" fighting, and a token effort to contain totalitarianism).
The old Nihilists in Russia took more than 50 years to "win" — by claiming that Russia was in a "crisis." The CURE was worse than the "crisis."
Edmund Burke once said that sometimes we must "tolerate" some imperfection (which is preferable to chaos and revolution). But our modern nihilists who preach "tolerance" are trying to silence Christianity and dissent, and even "regulate" the Internet. They are "full of themselves" and their hope and "change."
"It was prettily devised of Aesop, 'The fly sat upon the axletree of the chariot-wheel and said, what a dust do I raise.'" — Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Whether dissent is patriotic or dissent is hooliganism depends on whether the politician is waxing or waning, I guess. But you get the point, I "hope"!
CONCLUSION
Some people just don't get it, because they don't know the American people, they really don't. They have either spent too much time in the Ivy League, or they've never had a real job in the real world and gotten their hands dirty (the great "unwashed" out there don't appreciate it when they are being talked down to by Great Teachers. They don't appreciate it when politicians say one thing and do another).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) used to say:
We were brothers all
In honour, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen . . .
In the People was my trust,
And in the virtues which mine eyes had seen . . .
Not in Utopia — subterranean fields, -
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, — the place where, in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
YES! We're talking "the real world" here, and many of our forefathers understood that much better than contemporary nihilists, revolutionaries, and quick-change artists. When the Beatles sang "Imagine" a world without religion, what were they thinking?
Wordsworth said, "Imagination, which, in truth, is but another name for absolute power"!
Ah yes — UTOPIA (where "everything" [except nothing] is "FAIRER"!
May God have mercy and save us from Utopia!!
P.S. For further reading, here are some of my most under-read but timely columns:
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/030928 [on life-devoid-of-value in Germany, beginning with the 1920s]
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/030921 ["Whom the gods wish to con, they first make illiterate"]
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/040221 ["America's nervous breakdown: Another legacy of the 60s"]
www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/040229 ["Timing is everything" (on our second "civil" war — a culture war)]
PPS: In the "real world," Life is what YOU make it, not what Uncle Sam promises to make it.
© Curtis Dahlgren
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
