Poignant:
In my last memo I referred to my award as the Eckberg when it should have been Eckburg. My apologies Eckburg not Eckberg!
Also see P below!
+++
Some quirky humor.
| ||||||||||
"Dick,
Took some time but I read it all.Needs some digesting time.
I have a few observations.The Trump group need a wake up call re communications. We are not a protest party.
We should be capable of laying out, in plain facts and language, major objectives regarding Health Care .
Everyone thinks we have 20 million people getting insurance. Obama made sure to remind eligible people to enroll in Medicare (not a bad thing)
I am not sure of the number but I recall it is 10 to 12 million who would leave in today's numbers, 10 million or less buying or getting free or aid to buy coverage.
When was the last time you saw a simple chart explaining Total U.S.Population,
number of households (families) how many covered thru employers, government, military and the numbers of families who can
afford it buy their own insurance and do?
Democrats want everyone covered (socialized) bottom line. We have no narrative to explain a plan, build the facts and sell it. We can't even mount an effort to communicate the facts about the Democratic Party's
deliberate derailing of the vetting process which is obstructing the execution of the plans for the benefit of the people.
This opportunity came about thru a miracle (once in a Century.) The window for major change is short. My guess six months.
Communications 90% Trump. He claims to have put together a fabulous cabinet. They are the best people to articulate through their agencies: State, Treasury, Military,National Security, Atty. General etc. or else Trump will lose. There will be no second term.
Hope ( internally the team) can help him adopt to the facts of life. He has to accomplish tax reform,Obamacare, a no brainier, dozens of openings on the lower courts by July/August. Immigration by the end of the year.
A-----"
++++++++++++++++++++
Peter Thiel, right man at right time? (See 1 below.)
and
What does Bannon want? (See 1a below.)
==
Emotional logic regarding illegal immigrants and their rights. Free ticket, food and medical care? (See 2 below.)
+++++++
The impact of the '60's. My sentiments exactly. (See 3 below.)
+++++++++++++
Peter Thiel, right man at right time? (See 1 below.)
and
What does Bannon want? (See 1a below.)
==
Emotional logic regarding illegal immigrants and their rights. Free ticket, food and medical care? (See 2 below.)
+++++++
The impact of the '60's. My sentiments exactly. (See 3 below.)
+++++++++++++
A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named Pelosium. The chemical symbol of Pelosium is Pu. Pelosium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These particles are held together by dark particles called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
Pelosium's mass actually increases over time, as morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons within the Pelosium molecule, leading to the formation of isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientist to believe that Pelosium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Morass.
When catalyzed with money, Pelosium activates MSNBCobnoxium and CNNadnausium, both elements that radiate orders of magnitude more energy, albeit as incoherent noise, since they have half as many peons but twice as many morons as Pelosium.
Since it has no electrons, Pelosium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to the discoverers, a minute amount of Pelosium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second. In the presence of anti-morons, Pelosium can be extremely corrosive. Botox seems to distort and smooth its surface, without impeding its ongoing decay.
Pelosium has a normal half-life of approximately two years, at which time it does not decay, but instead undergoes a transmutation, appearing in a new location but displaying the same properties. In this process, assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic mass actually increases after each transmutation.
Research at other laboratories indicates that Pelosium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations, universities, and anywhere there is news coverage occurring. It can usually be found in the newest, best appointed, and best maintained buildings.
The discovery may lead to a corollary to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as it has now been determined that efforts to measure the number of morons in a given area actually increases the number of morons.
Scientists point out that Pelosium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how Pelosium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.
++++++++++++++
1a)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) Former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vs. the Phoenix Suns owner
"What if the owners of the Suns discovered that
Billionaire iconoclast Peter Thiel's fingerprints are all over the administration.
In early December, the name of a candidate to be the science adviser to the president began percolating in Trump Tower: David Gelernter, the reclusive Yale University computer scientist known for his dripping disdain for the liberal intellectual elite and for surviving an attack by the Unabomber.
Gelernter had no connection to Trump or his top political aides. And he would be an unconventional choice for the post: The 61-year-old professor is neither a physicist nor biologist, as is typical for the post, but a pioneering technologist credited with predicting the rise of the Internet.
But Gelernter has long been friendly with Peter Thiel. He regularly attends an annual conference of iconoclastic thinkers that the Silicon Valley billionaire hosts on the French Riviera. So it was on Thiel’s recommendation that Gelernter sat down at Trump Tower with the president-elect, his chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Thiel himself four days before the inauguration. The meeting followed a prior discussion between Gelernter and senior transition officials.
Gelernter’s potential elevation is just one small sign of Thiel’s growing stature in Trump world. He was a near-constant presence throughout the transition: Working with a staff of four to six aides from an office in Trump Tower, Thiel dispatched associates from his investment firms to help staff agencies across the government. Their reach extended from the Department of Commerce to the Pentagon and eventually to the White House, where one of his closest aides, Kevin Harrington, was recently elevated to the National Security Council.“Once Election Day came and went, Peter Thiel was a major force in the transition,” said a senior Trump campaign aide. “When you have offices and you bring staff with you and you attend all the meetings, then you have a lot of power.” At the Presidio, the old Army fort in San Francisco where Thiel’s investment firms are housed, many of his employees have taken to calling him “the shadow president.”
The notion is not entirely absurd. If Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, is one ideological pillar of the Trump White House, Thiel, operating from outside the administration, is the other. Bannon’s ideology is a sort of populist nationalism, while Thiel’s is tech-centric: He believes progress is dependent on a revolution in technology that has been largely stymied by government regulation.
Thiel is a contrarian by nature, and his support for Trump was a signature long-shot bet that is paying big dividends in terms of access to and influence on the new administration.
Trump’s surprise victory in November also gave Thiel a renewed faith in the possibilities of politics, and he has worked around the clock to push friends and associates into positions that will give them sway over science and technology policy, an area he believes has been routinely neglected under previous administrations.
That helps to explain why Jim O’Neill, a managing director at Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital Management, is now being considered to run the Food and Drug Administration. O’Neill served at the Department of Health and Human Services in the George W. Bush administration but has no medical background. He has argued that drugs should not have to go through clinical trials to prove their efficacy before they are sold to consumers.
“The fact that Jim is even in consideration for the position is astonishing,” said one Thiel associate. “It’s legitimately an outrageous coup for Peter to be able to put somebody at that high a level of government.”
Trae Stephens, a longtime Thiel colleague who oversaw the Defense Department transition, raised the eyebrows of officials as he traipsed through the bowels of the Pentagon asking questions about the government procurement process. Stephens spent several years at Palantir, the Thiel-founded data-mining company that brought a successful lawsuit against the government taking a sledgehammer to the Pentagon’s rigid procurement process. A federal court ruled in October that the company could bid on a $206 million Pentagon contract it would normally have been prevented from competing for.Inside the Pentagon, Stephens’ focus, according to two sources familiar with the conversations, was on “how one might restructure the DOD’s procurement operations to save money.”
Stephens’ inquiries were “unusual, that’s why people mentioned it to me,” said one of the sources, a former high-level Pentagon official.
The lawsuit, Palantir’s lawyer said in the wake of the October ruling, wasn’t just about the company’s bottom line; it was aimed at “making it more appealing for innovators” to do business in the nation’s capital. Stephens did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to Thiel and his team in Trump Tower, a handful of Thiel associates also took on critical posts in the Trump transition, with Harrington, now at the NSC, working to fill positions at the Department of Commerce; and Mark Woolway, a Thiel colleague from his PayPal days, doing the same at the Treasury Department. Others slated to take on important roles in the administration — such as Josh Wright, who is likely to run the Justice Department’s antitrust division — have come with Thiel’s imprimatur.A spokesman for Thiel declined to comment for the story. A senior White House official would say only that “Peter has been a very prominent supporter of the president’s and we are grateful for his support."
An aligning of outcasts
The openly gay, 49-year-old tech entrepreneur and the 70-year-old real-estate magnate have little in common on the surface. But the two share qualities that have made Thiel a valued adviser in Trump world, particularly as the politicians who supported Trump during the campaign — Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani — have slowly fallen away.
Both Thiel and Trump are outcasts, Thiel in liberal Silicon Valley, where his libertarian politics have set him apart; Trump in the world of New York real estate, where his outer borough bombast made him an object of derision. Both are distrustful of elites and conventional wisdom.
Thiel is a devotee of the Stanford literary critic and philosopher René Girard, most famous for his theory of “mimetic desire” — the idea that people learn to want the same things, which eventually causes conflict. In a 2011 interview with The New Yorker’s George Packer, Thiel said he was troubled by how “disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts,” and that he has “always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.”There is no better or more recent example of that than Trump’s candidacy, which upended every law of politics the so-called experts thought held true.Old-fashioned political connections, forged in Manhattan boardrooms and sleek Silicon Valley office spaces, also helped ease Thiel’s ascension in Trump’s orbit. His initial connection to Trump came through the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Thiel is a longtime investor in the health care startup founded by Kushner’s brother, Josh and Thiel and Jared Kushner had extensive conversations in the spring of 2016 about whether he would become a delegate for Trump in California’s Republican primary.
Thiel went public with his support for Trump in May at the urging of Kevin Harrington, a longtime principal at Thiel Capital with whom he has — as another Thiel employee described it — a sort of “mind meld.” Not only did Thiel serve as a delegate for the GOP nominee, but he delivered a prime-time speech on his behalf at the Republican National Convention and contributed more than $1 million to his campaign.
His high-profile demonstrations of support thereafter won the attention and affection of Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump.
“Thiel is immensely powerful within the administration through his connection to Jared,” said a senior Trump campaign aide.
The Trump campaign bible
Campaign aides also say that Thiel’s 200-page treatise on startups, “Zero to One,” served as something of a bible among Trump campaign staffers. Leafing through the book, which encapsulates some of Thiel’s iconoclastic views, it’s immediately apparent why Trump’s aides were receptive to it. Thiel argues that savvy marketing is as important as a decent product; that it’s better to be bold than to be inconsequential; and that technology rather than globalization will shape the future.
The book originated in a class Thiel taught at Stanford, and Blake Masters, one of his students who became his co-author, was at his side during the transition, conducting interviews with candidates for various administration posts. Also along for the ride: Michael Kratsios, Thiel’s chief of staff, and Charlie Kirk, a 23-year-old wunderkind who blew off college to start a grass-roots organization dedicated to training young conservatives in the art of persuasion — and plugging them into the right networks.
Thiel’s most visible involvement in the transition came during a fleeting moment in mid-December when he organized a summit that brought some of the country’s top technology executives, from Apple’s Tim Cook to Google’s Larry Page to Trump Tower for a meeting with the president-elect. Cameras captured him entering the gold-paneled elevators in the lobby, and, shortly thereafter, Trump gently petting his hand as the tech executives and a slew of reporters looked on in astonishment.
Few remarked at the time how surprising his presence there, and his involvement in the transition, actually were. Thiel has for years pooh-poohed politics. “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms,” he wrote in a 2009 essay published by the libertarian Cato Institute, in which he argued that “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.”
In “Zero to One,” Thiel argues that technological progress stalled in the 1970s in part because of to the growth of entitlement programs and the explosion of the regulatory state. His venture capital firm, Mithril Capital, pours money into companies that are leveraging technology in new ways. It, too, has deepened his belief that government regulation is impeding technological advancement.The result, he writes, is that the country — and the world — has seen change without progress.
“The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs,” he writes in “Zero to One.”
Life extension technology, in which he has a deep interest, is but one example. “My own guess is that I will live to age 100 to 120, so I’m frustrated that the technologies aren’t going as quickly as they should because of government interference,” he told the libertarian magazine Reason in 2008. He expounded on that view in a 2015 interview with The Washington Post in which he aired his concern that “the FDA is too restrictive,” that “pharmaceutical sales are way too bureaucratic,” and that government is filled with people who are “nimble in the art of writing grants who have squeezed out the more creative.”
Removing those hurdles is precisely what Thiel’s friends and associates across the government will be looking to do, with an eye to bringing about a Thielian world in which people live to 120 years old — on libertarian islands in the middle of the ocean, if they so choose.
1a)
President Trump presents a problem to those who look at politics in terms of systematic ideologies. He is either disinclined or unable to lay out his agenda in that way. So perhaps it was inevitable that Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who does have a gift for thinking systematically, would be so often invoked by Mr. Trump’s opponents. They need him not just as a hate object but as a heuristic, too. There may never be a “Trumpism,” and unless one emerges, the closest we may come to understanding this administration is as an expression of “Bannonism.”
Mr. Bannon, 63, has won a reputation for abrasive brilliance at almost every stop in his unorthodox career — as a naval officer, Goldman Sachs mergers specialist, entertainment-industry financier, documentary screenwriter and director, Breitbart News cyber-agitprop impresario and chief executive of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. One Harvard Business School classmate described him to The Boston Globe as “top three in intellectual horsepower in our class — perhaps the smartest.” Benjamin Harnwell of the Institute for Human Dignity, a Catholic organization in Rome, calls him a “walking bibliography.” Perhaps because Mr. Bannon came late to conservatism, turning his full-time energy to political matters only after the Sept. 11 attacks, he radiates an excitement about it that most of his conservative contemporaries long ago lost.
One month into the Trump administration, Mr. Bannon has already made his influence felt. He helped draft the president’s Inaugural Address, acquired a seat on the National Security Council and reportedly was the main force behind the president’s stalled ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Reports that the administration has considered designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization echo Mr. Bannon’s own longtime preoccupation with the group, as both a screenwriter and a talk-radio host.
Many accounts of Mr. Bannon paint him as a cartoon villain or internet troll come to life, as a bigot, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a crypto-fascist. The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, have even called him a “white nationalist.” While he is certainly a hard-line conservative of some kind, the evidence that he is an extremist of a more troubling sort has generally been either massaged, misread or hyped up.
There may be good reasons to worry about Mr. Bannon, but they are not the ones everyone is giving. It does not make Mr. Bannon a fascist that he happens to know who the 20th-century Italian extremist Julius Evola is. It does not make Mr. Bannon a racist that he described Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right” — a broad and imprecise term that applies to a wide array of radicals, not just certain white supremacist groups.
Nor does it make Mr. Bannon a fringe character that during the meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013 and 2014, he hosted rival panel discussions called the Uninvited — although it did show a relish for the role of ideological bad boy. Mr. Bannon’s panels included such mainstream figures as the former House speaker Newt Gingrich and the former Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey, and discussed such familiar Republican preoccupations as military preparedness and the 2012 attacks on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya. It wasn’t much different from watching Fox News.
Where Mr. Bannon does veer sharply from recent mainstream Republicanism is in his all-embracing nationalism. He speaks of sovereignty, economic nationalism, opposition to globalization and finding common ground with Brexit supporters and other groups hostile to the transnational European Union. On Thursday, at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, he described the “center core” of Trump administration philosophy as the belief that the United States is more than an economic unit in a borderless word. It is “a nation with a culture” and “a reason for being.”
So some of the roots of Mr. Bannon’s ideology, like the roots of Mr. Trump’s popularity, are to be found in the disappointed hopes of the global economy. But Mr. Bannon, unlike Mr. Trump, has a detailed idea, an explanation, of how American sovereignty was lost, and of what to do about it. It is the same idea that Tea Party activists have: A class of regulators in the government has robbed Americans of their democratic prerogatives. That class now constitutes an “administrative state” that operates to empower itself and enrich its crony-capitalist allies.
When Mr. Bannon spoke on Thursday of “deconstructing the administrative state,” it may have sounded like gobbledygook outside the hall, but it was an electrifying profession of faith for the attendees. It is through Mr. Bannon that Trumpism can be converted from a set of nostalgic laments and complaints into a program for overhauling the government.
Mr. Bannon adds something personal and idiosyncratic to this Tea Party mix. He has a theory of historical cycles that can be considered elegantly simple or dangerously simplistic. It is a model laid out by William Strauss and Neil Howe in two books from the 1990s. Their argument assumes an 80- to 100-year cycle divided into roughly 20-year “highs,” “awakenings,” “unravelings” and “crises.” The American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, World War II — Mr. Bannon has said for years that we’re due for another crisis about now. His documentary about the 2008 financial collapse, “Generation Zero,” released in 2010, uses the Strauss-Howe model to explain what happened, and concludes with Mr. Howe himself saying, “History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”
Mr. Bannon’s views reflect a transformation of conservatism over the past decade or so. You can trace this transformation in the films he has made. His 2004 documentary, “In the Face of Evil,” is an orthodox tribute to the Republican Party hero Ronald Reagan. But “Generation Zero,” half a decade later, is a strange hybrid. The financial crash has intervened. Mr. Bannon’s film features predictable interviews with think-tank supply siders and free marketers fretting about big government. But new, less orthodox voices creep in, too, from the protectionist newscaster Lou Dobbs to the investment manager Barry Ritholtz. They question whether the free market is altogether free. Mr. Ritholtz says that the outcome of the financial crisis has been “socialism for the wealthy but capitalism for everybody else.”
By 2014, Mr. Bannon’s own ideology had become centered on this distrust. He was saying such things about capitalism himself. “Think about it,” he said in a talk hosted by the Institute for Human Dignity. “Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis.” He warned against “the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” by which he meant “a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people.” Capitalism, he said, ought to rest on a “Judeo-Christian” foundation.
If so, this was bad news for the Republican Party. By the time Mr. Bannon spoke, Ayn Rand-style capitalism was all that remained of its Reagan-era agenda. Free-market thinking had swallowed the party whole, and its Judeo-Christian preoccupations — “a nation with a culture” and “a reason for being” — along with it. A business orientation was what donors wanted.
But voters never more than tolerated it. It was Pat Buchanan who in his 1992 run for president first called on Republicans to value jobs and communities over profits. An argument consumed the party over whether this was a better-rounded vision of society or just the grousing of a reactionary. After a generation, Mr. Buchanan has won that argument. By 2016 his views on trade and migration, once dismissed as crackpot, were spreading so fast that everyone in the party had embraced them — except its elected officials and its establishment presidential candidates.
Mr. Bannon does not often go into detail about what Judeo-Christian culture is, but he knows one thing it is not: Islam. Like most Americans, he believes that Islamism — the extremist political movement — is a dangerous adversary. More controversially he holds that, since this political movement is generated within the sphere of Islam, the growth of Islam — the religion — is itself a problem with which American authorities should occupy themselves. This is a view that was emphatically repudiated by Presidents Obama and George W. Bush.
Mr. Bannon has apparently drawn his own views on the subject from intensive, if not necessarily varied, reading. The thinkers he has engaged with in this area tend to be hot and polemical rather than cool and detached. They include the provocateur Pamela Geller, a campaigner against the “Ground Zero Mosque” who once suggested the State Department was “essentially being run by Islamic supremacists”; her sometime collaborator Robert Spencer, the director of the website Jihad Watch, with whom she heads an organization called Stop Islamization of America; and the former Department of Homeland Security official Philip Haney, who has argued that officials in the Obama administration had compromised “the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness.”
President Trump being unpopular among intellectuals, any thinker in his cabinet will be, at some level, a nonconformist, a rebel or an individualist. That may yet make things interesting for the country. It will certainly make Washington a hostile environment for Mr. Bannon. Many policy intellectuals in the capital have paid a steep price in swallowed misgivings and trimmed convictions to get to the place that Mr. Bannon has somehow blown into town and usurped. He never had to compromise or even modify his principles. His boss didn’t even get a majority of the popular vote. Establishment conservatives may be prone to mistake their jealousy for a principled conviction that Mr. Bannon is unsocialized and dangerous.
Is he? Last summer the historian Ronald Radosh contributed to this image with his (later contested) recollection that, years ago, Mr. Bannon, in the only conversation the two ever had, described himself as a “Leninist” who wanted to “bring everything crashing down.”
But Mr. Bannon’s ideology, whatever it may be, does not wholly capture what drives him, says the screenwriter Julia Jones. Starting in the early 1990s, Ms. Jones and Mr. Bannon began writing screenplays together, and did so for a decade and a half. She is one of the few longtime collaborators in his otherwise peripatetic career. As Ms. Jones sees it, a more reliable key to his worldview lies in his military service. “He has a respect for duty,” she said in early February. “The word he has used a lot is ‘dharma.’ ” Mr. Bannon found the concept of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, she recalls. It can describe one’s path in life or one’s place in the universe.
When Mr. Bannon came to Hollywood, Ms. Jones says, he was less political. For two years, according to Ms. Jones, the two of them worked on the outline of a 26-part television series about seekers after the secrets of the human self, from Arthur Conan Doyle to Nietzsche to Madame Blavatsky to Ramakrishna to the Baal Shem Tov to Geronimo. “It was his idea,” she said. “He assembled all the people.”
But the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Jones says, changed him, and their collaboration did not survive his growing engagement with politics. Speaking of his films, she says, “He developed a kind of propaganda-type tone of voice that I found offensive.” Ms. Jones is a literary person, left-liberal in politics. She regrets that Mr. Bannon “has found a home in nationalism.” But she does not believe he is any kind of anarchist, let alone a racist.
Those focused on Mr. Bannon’s ideology are probably barking up the wrong tree. There are plenty of reasons for concern about Mr. Bannon, but they have less to do with where he stands on the issues than with who he is as a person. He is a newcomer to political power and, in fact, relatively new to an interest in politics. He is willing to break with authority. While he does not embrace any of the discredited ideologies of the last century, he is attached to a theory of history’s cycles that is, to put it politely, untested. Most ominously, he is an intellectual in politics excited by grand theories — a combination that has produced unpredictable results before.
We’ll see how it works out. Barack Obama, in a similar way, used to allude to the direction and the “arc” of history. Some may find the two theories of history equally naïve and unrealistic. Others may see a mitigating element in the cyclical nature of Mr. Bannon’s view. A progressive who believes history is more or less linear is fighting for immortality when he enters the political arena. A conservative who believes history is cyclical is fighting only for a role in managing, say, the next 20 or 80 years. Then his work will be undone, as everyone’s is eventually.
2) Former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vs. the Phoenix Suns owner
The owner of the Phoenix Suns basketball team,
Robert Sarver, came out strongly opposing
AZ's new immigration laws.
Arizona's Governor, Jan Brewer,
released the following statement in response to
Sarver's criticism of the new law:
hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying?
What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers are
but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed
to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs,
thus non-paying attendees couldn't be ejected.
Furthermore, what if Suns' ownership was expected to
provide those who sneaked in with complimentary
eats and drink?
And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher
became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide
free medical care and shelter?"
Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer
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3)
The Decade That Won’t End
The legacy of the 1960s is all around us—not least an atmosphere of anger, outrage and intolerance. Lee Edwards reviews “All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s” by J. Harvie Wilkinson III.
The decade of the 1960s continues to fascinate us, and with good reason. It was a transformational decade, like the 1770s (with the founding of the republic), the 1860s (the Civil War) and the 1930s (the Depression). The civil-rights movement transformed the way America treated its black citizens. Vietnam transformed the way we looked at war. The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy,Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X shook our political structure from top to bottom. Women’s rights, gay rights, students’ rights, the counterculture: All had their genesis in the tumultuous 1960s.
Were the 1960s, then, one of the “greatest” decades ever or a decade that inflicted more harm than any other in modern times? That is the question that J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a federal appeals-court judge in Virginia, addresses in his elegiac memoir, “All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s.” Judge Wilkinson experienced those years as a Yale undergraduate caught up in campus unrest and then as a draftee headed perhaps for Vietnam. He writes eloquently and persuasively about the impact of the 1960s, arguing that the pervasive anger of today’s politics can be traced to “that burnt and ravaged forest of a decade.”
Stressing the darker side of the 1960s, Judge Wilkinson laments the loss of key components of our cultural legacy: the “true meaning” of education; the capacity for lasting personal commitments; an appreciation of the rule of law; and a feeling for “rootedness and home.” He argues that in the 1960s we started to lose a sense of things larger than ourselves: “the desire for service, the feeling for country, the need for God.”
Acknowledging the limitations of his perspective as a “white, Protestant, Southern, and distinctly privileged male,” Judge Wilkinson says that a personal account can best describe “the wreckage the Sixties left behind.” He revisits his Yale days, when he was a leader of the Political Union, and he decries the campus rancor that helped create today’s close-mindedness. He recalls his basic training as an Army ROTC candidate when he battled daily with a prototypical sergeant determined to make obedient soldiers out of independent-minded civilians. As difficult as the experience was, he concedes the value of such training, which did not so much narrow his mind as shape his character.
Of all the damage done by the 1960s, Judge Wilkinson writes, the damage to education “may be the worst,” with the politicization of the campus becoming the politicization of the culture. The old adage that “politics stops at the water’s edge,” he says, lost all currency, and bipartisanship became ever more difficult to secure. “After the 1960s, politics stopped nowhere.” More than a decade after William F. Buckley Jr. charged in “God and Man at Yale” that Yale professors were committed anti-capitalists, Judge Wilkinson was so persuaded by a professor’s excoriations of “robber barons” that he abandoned “any thought of a career in business.”
But he did not join the vanguard of the 1960s—“the ironically named” Students for a Democratic Society that pioneered the techniques of intimidating college administrations: shouting down speakers, occupying buildings, forcing classes to be canceled. Of all places, he says, Yale “should have stood against these trends. Instead, it succumbed to them.”
Judge Wilkinson also leaves out a major political occurrence of the 1960s—the rise of the right, led by politicians like Barry Goldwater and intellectuals like Buckley. They laid the foundation for a conservative movement that has influenced and frequently dominated American politics ever since. Admittedly, it has had less influence on the culture, which remains liberal if not libertine.
In a grim final chapter titled “The Fall of Faith,” Judge Wilkinson says that “we came close to losing our wonderful country in the 1960s and that must never happen again.” His solution? Do not repeat the mistakes of that time: arrogance; rampant individualism; a contempt for institutions; a willing involvement in senseless foreign conflicts; a turning away from God. But how do we ensure that we do not repeat such mistakes? Perhaps, as a start, by inculcating conservative values: prudence, not rashness; custom, not the impulse of the moment; reform, not revolution. It was T.S. Eliot who reminded us that there are no “lost” causes because there are no “gained” causes. There is only an unceasing struggle to preserve liberty, no matter the decade.
—Mr. Edwards is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
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