Happy

Does everyone want to be happy? We are told so ... but I have my doubts as to what this means. Are serial killers happy offing their next victim? Perhaps. Did OJ find joy in slashing the throats of his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman? Perhaps. Did Pol Pot have a smile on his face as he slaughtered 2 million Cambodians? Perhaps. Was Chairman Mao gleeful when his Great Leap Forward starved to death perhaps ten million of his countrymen? Perhaps.

Obviously happiness is a very relevant thing. Monasteries and nunneries exist for a primary purpose of assuring a state of grace to their participants ... a distillation of happiness. We all believe that happiness should be all goodness and light. But this is clearly not the case. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that many people find comfort in things that most of us consider bizarre. Our newspapers would quickly fold if they could not report on the many aberrations and outright crimes perpetuated by anti-social creeps who are seeking out their own sick form of joy.

So, our classic notions of what motivate people may be right in the whole, but clearly misfire for large swaths of homo sapiens. Do we need to rethink what the guarantee “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence means? Perhaps we need a finer form of the word “happiness?” Specifying that it must be the benign form of this emotion?

I can’t think of a word for this constricted form of joy. Can you?

Afterward: Beatific?

Mt. Rushmore

Where are the Left leading their snowflake acolytes? Like the Taliban did to that huge stone Buddha in Afghanistan, they are jackhammering the presidents' faces off of Mt. Rushmore. The above picture was taken when they were 3/4s done. The plan is to replace these old dead white presidents with likeness of Barack Obama, Hugo Chavez, Mao and Pol Pot.

Next, the plan is to dynamite the Confederate generals' likenesses off of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Suggested replacements include Ho Chi Minh, Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers.

What’s in A Name?

Would a rose still look so red?  Hillary Clinton wrote her mini-opus, It Takes a Village,  propounding her political meme that self-determination is bad and collectivism is good. And I just re-read the poem, “No Man is an Island” by John Donne (see: The Poem ) in an e-mail by a “progressive” thinker of a close friend … as a way of showing the way to his nirvana (“It tolls for thee”).  

Now Van Jones, one of Obama’s original Socialist henchmen (and now a MSNBC contributor no less) has coined a new portmanteau term “communitarian” as a way of camouflaging his hard-leftist theology … see: Breitbart Story.  Even Obama’s inaugural address dances around the notion that rugged individualism in the United States is now passé:

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all societies [sic] ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character. [Hey, sounds good!} 

[But, wait!] For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. [The ideological curtain is raised]

I am constantly awed by how persistent a failed political movement can be.  Thirty years ago, we thought Communism was dead.  It had proven itself to be a precursor to totalitarianism over and over again (Pol Pot, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Sukarno, etc.).  Yet on-the-make politicians seem continually to trek back to drink from this tainted trough so as to rally their naive proletariat to a cause that seems so magnanimous and Christ-like.  And, only when the hook in firmly planted in the tender mouths of these fish, do they realize, too late, that they are not to be fed, but to feed.