Frequality

It's a neologism I just came up with to describe the strange synthesis in modern America between two antithetical notions:  freedom and equality.  We supposedly champion these ideals to the extreme, yet they chafe against each other because freedom can and does produce inequality.  People who are free to pursue their God-given talents will soon discover that God does not parcel out talent in the same types or quantities -- some will earn more money, speak and write more coherently, become astronauts, run faster, shoot straighter, and so on.

Because modern America values equality more than freedom, though, we find the most enthusiasm centered on the kind of freedom that is accessible to everyone and does not threaten equality.  And what kind of freedom is accessible to everyone?  The libertine kind, otherwise known as self-indulgence.  Tattoos, body piercings, unconventional hairstyles and clothing, bizarre hobbies, promiscuity and sexual experimentation, are all preferred forms of "freedom" that demand no talent and thus do not threaten to establish hierarchies of value or achievement.

A seeming counter-example is the modern obsession with celebrities such as professional athletes, actors, and singers.  But if we take a closer look it becomes obvious that such people are not celebrated for their excellence (and I would submit that modern actors and singers are decidedly NOT excellent, but that's beside the point); instead, such people are celebrated because they entertain and titillate the masses.  The masses view such people as their own, as in "my football team" or "my favorite singer," so the celebrity provides yet another outlet for mindless and non-threatening frequality.

The scorn directed at the "nerd" -- which is a fairly recent phenomenon, by the way -- is a stark example of how frequality denounces those whose individualism threatens to go places where the masses cannot follow.  If you want to fit into modern America, be free, but try to avoid using that freedom in any serious or constructive way.  Oh, and if you're still wondering why the economy is collapsing, there's not much I can do to help you. 

What The Presidential Debates Have Revealed

Is terrifying.  I say this with regard to the entire tone of the debates and what both candidates contributed to them; my indictment is not ideological. 

According to these candidates the entire world is a playground for them to frolic upon as they wish.  There is no state sovereignty within America; any attempt by a state to uphold the health, safety, and morals of its citizens must meet with federal approval.  There is no national sovereignty outside America; any country governing itself in a way the federal government dislikes may be invaded and "liberated" in the tradition of Napoleon or Stalin.  There are no private relationships beyond political control; any attempt at freedom of (non-)association or freedom of contract that displeases the political class will be penalized.  All economic activity -- i.e., the pursuit of happiness -- belongs to the political class to manipulate via taxing, spending, and regulation. There is no money or property that cannot be seized and re-distributed.  Reducing government largesse is considered a "taking" from tax recipients.  Reducing taxation is considered a "gift" to taxpayers.  The ends justify the means, so anything worth doing is worth compelling by government force.  In short, the state is society, and society is the state.

The only difference between the candidates is their particular recipe for mixing these ingredients to arrive at utopia; they agree on the underlying premise of boundless power.  Thus I refuse to legitimize this or any federal election with my participation.  My loyalty is to America and the Constitution, not to the lawless abomination these candidates seek to helm.  Elections will not rein the beast in, but the rising tide of debt will suffocate it.  Thank God. 

More Grammar Gripes

I've been remiss in discussing the grammar errors that darken the modern literary landscape.  If I were a copy editor at any major newspaper or book publisher I would work myself into an early grave trying to combat all this stuff.

It's "supersede," not "supercede."

What is with the run-on sentences?  If you have an independent clause with a subject, verb, and object then you cannot just slap another independent clause next to it without some separating punctuation.  "I hate Bob and he smells funny" is plain wrong.  Try "I hate Bob, and he smells funny."  Or try "I hate Bob; he smells funny."  Or just make two sentences with "I hate Bob.  He smells funny." 

No apostrophes to create plural abbreviations.  CDs, ATMs, PINs, and the 1990s are all fine without apostrophes.

"Travesty" does not mean "tragedy."  It means mockery or pale imitation.  When I saw a recent newspaper article describe a man's death as a travesty, it struck me that the article itself had become one.

"Data" and "media" are plural, not singular ("datum" and "medium" are the singulars).  If you can't bring yourself to use them correctly, substitute "information" and "press," respectively.

Use the possessive before the gerund.  "I'm grateful for him arriving on time" should be "I'm grateful for his arriving on time."

A possessive cannot be a pronoun antecedent.  "Mike's genius allows him to see the future" is wrong because "him" is undefined.  "Mike's genius allows Mike to see the future" is right.

"Lie" versus "lay."  This one drives me nuts because everyone on God's green Earth messes it up (and no, ending a sentence with a preposition is not a mistake).  "To lie" is intransitive and has no external object.  "To lay" is transitive and concerns what a person does to something else. The confusion seems to stem from the fact that the past tense of "to lie" is, coincidentally, "lay."  People should straighten this out in elementary school, but I'm here to provide remedial education, so let's review:

To Lie (no external object)

Present = lie, lies ("Lie down and take a nap.")

Past = lay ("I lay down for a nap yesterday.")

Past Participle (for perfect tenses) = lain  ("I have lain down for a nap for five straight days.")

To Lay (external object)

Present = lay, lays ("Lay the gun on the ground.")

Past = laid ("I laid the gun on the ground just as you told me.")

Past Participle (for perfect tenses) = laid ("I have laid the gun on the ground just as you told me.")

Bus Driver Decks Passenger, But Why The Outrage?

There's a video floating around the Internet of a Cleveland bus driver who decks a passenger who was insulting him and eventually assaulted him.  (I won't post the video here, for I am confident you can find it yourself.)  Once the passenger laid hands on him, he got up and delivered an uppercut, throwing the passenger off the bus.  Apparently unfazed, the passenger kept fighting and got back onto the bus, but the driver eventually prevailed.

Now the driver has lost his job, and the story is drawing a huge amount of attention and outrage.  Why?  Because the passenger was a woman.  Since I am a born-again feminist, I have trouble understanding this.  Men and woman are equal, gosh darn it, and he treated her just as he would treat any man acting in such a despicable way.  Isn't this a sign of progress?

Around The Web

I occasionally participate in online discussions IF the website is one where people demonstrate the ability to think outside the box.  Recently I posted a couple of comments that strike me as worthy of sharing here.

The first one is my response to a self-described lawyer named "George" who couldn't understand why I had said that the Constitution is not whatever the Supreme Court says.  The fact that a lawyer would ask such a question speaks volumes about the state of modern legal education.  His question was posed as a challenge for me to define what "speech" means under the First Amendment, as if his view of judicial supremacy were self-evident.  I disabused him of that notion:

Delayed response to George's question about how to find meaning in some of the Constitution's vagaries. Unless I'm mistaken, the gist of his question is that it only makes sense to rely on the Supreme Court to iron these wrinkles out, a notion I completely reject.

First, the Supreme Court's role is simply to decide cases and controversies. Sometimes the Court must interpret the Constitution to perform this function, but those interpretations are binding solely on the litigating parties and the lower courts -- they do not bind anyone else. Every branch of the federal government has a duty to uphold the Constitution, so if the Court issues a cockeyed pronouncement, the other branches can and MUST disregard it. So should the States, according to none other than Thomas Jefferson and the very "father" of the Constitution, James Madison. To believe otherwise is to believe that the federal government is the final arbiter of its own powers, which is the quintessence of tyranny.

Second, the Supreme Court has gone beyond its function of "judicial review" (i.e., constitutional enforcement) and claims the right to update the Constitution to fit modern times (i.e., constitutional amendment). This is a grotesque usurpation, for the amendment process is spelled out in Article V of the Constitution and requires legislative supermajorities among the States and Congress. Once again, to propose that a simple majority of five lawyers out of nine may amend the Constitution is tyrannical in the extreme.

And third, as to the meaning of "speech" in the First Amendment, it's important to recall that the Bill of Rights was drafted to apply solely to the federal government, as John Marshall held in Barron v. Baltimore. The Supreme Court has twisted the 14th Amendment (which was illegally passed, by the way) to mean that the federal government may apply the Bill of Rights -- and "penumbras" and "emanations" thereof -- to States and thus perpetually censor their laws, which inverts the constitutional order and makes the federal government master rather than servant. There is no need to tie ourselves in knots over what "speech" means. The answer is simple. A State law is presumptively valid and falls within the vast reservoir of power that the States kept via the 10th Amendment -- unless the law violates one of the few prohibitions on the States such as ex post facto, bill of attainder, or impairment of contract, it survives. A federal law is presumptively invalid because 1) the federal government has only enumerated powers, so the law must point to its constitutional source, and 2) even those enumerated powers may not be used in violation of the Bill of Rights, which is really just a redundant safety device. As to Citizens United (which I assume you're driving at), that was a federal law restricting how corporations could spend their own money with regard to political messages. Even if there is no "speech" in this equation, such a law has no constitutional basis anyway. But the regulation was directly tethered to the type of spending, and that type was political speech, so it was doubly invalid.

My second comment was a response to a post on a popular blog.  The blogger shares my (and many other people's) understanding that Western civilization is collapsing.  He focused on the Moon landing as marking the culmination of Western achievement, noting that we have lost the ability to duplicate that feat and backslid on many fronts ever since.  I threw out this generic observation:

Success always contains the seeds of its own destruction. In the case of human society, those seeds are the people born into wealth and plenty, who take those miracles as a given. Leftism sprouts from these seeds and identifies any lingering want or injustice as intolerable, demanding that political force be used to eradicate them. After that it is only a matter of time until the foundations of success collapse.

Like a great star that begins processing iron at its core, a great society that begins processing leftists at its core is doomed.

Schopenhauer Tells It Like It Is

Perhaps my favorite philosopher is Arthur Schopenhauer, the crotchety German who in the 19th century expanded on Immanuel Kant's dichotomy between what is seen (the phenomenon) and the thing-in-itself that remains unseen (the noumenon).  Schopenhauer earned his fame by identifying the noumenon as "the will," describing at length how all energy and striving in the universe are driven by this blind urge.  When it came to mankind, Schopenhauer explained how this blind urge is the master of the intellect rather than the servant for most, leading to the sad and repetitive cycle in which what is good and true endlessly yields to what is gratifying and false.  "Man can do as he will, but he cannot will as he will."  

At the same time, though, Schopenhauer devoted attention to a subset of humanity who are capable of escaping the clutches of the will and allowing their intellect to roam freely.  His numerous reflections on this are informative and entertaining.  For now, I will share just one and parcel out others later:

But while Nature sets very wide differences between man and man in respect both of morality and of intellect, society disregards and effaces them; or, rather, it sets up artificial differences in their stead -- gradations of rank and position, which are very often diametrically opposed to those which Nature establishes.  The result of this arrangement is to elevate those whom Nature has placed low, and to depress the few who stand high.  These latter, then, usually withdraw from society, where, as soon as it is at all numerous, vulgarity reigns supreme.

What offends a great intellect in society is the equality of rights, leading to equality of pretensions, which everyone enjoys; while at the same time, inequality of capacity means a corresponding disparity of social power.  So-called good society recognizes every kind of claim but that of intellect, which is a contraband article; and people are expected to exhibit an unlimited amount of patience towards every form of folly and stupidity, perversity, and dullness; whilst personal merit has to beg pardon, as it were, for being present, or else conceal itself altogether.  Intellectual superiority offends by its very existence, without any desire to do so.

The worst of what is called good society is not only that it offers us the companionship of people who are unable to win either our praise or our affection but that it does not allow of our being that which we naturally are; it compels us, for the sake of harmony, to shrivel up, or even alter our shape altogether.  Intellectual conversation, whether grave or humorous, is only fit for intellectual society; it is downright abhorrent to ordinary people, to please whom it is absolutely necessary to be commonplace and dull.        

If you doubt Schopenhauer's stinging insight, just try posting about an intellectual topic (philosophy, political science, mathematics, literature) on Facebook and see what happens.