The British Dichotomy

In an uncharacteristic non-Dartmouth-related post, Joseph Asch recounts Winston Churchill's courageous words and deeds in resisting Nazi Germany's aggressions leading up to the Second World War ... contrasting them with President Obummer's appeasing actions surroundong his Iranian nuclear capitulation ... see: Dartblog Posting.

I suppose we now have a clue as to why Obummer, in one of his first actions as president, had Churchill's bust removed from the Oval Office,

And, on a more personal level, even as a young boy, I can still recall my dismay as the British electorate jettisoned Churchill from the office of Prime Minister shortly after the war was over in favor of that twit, Clement Attlee and then later that fop, Anthony Eden. The national psyche of Britain exhibits a clear dichotomy ... rising to greatness in times of crisis ... only to mortgage it all as soon as leisure permits.

Do we see a parallel psyche here in the United States?

Luegenpresse

Some Germans have an interesting term for their main-stream media, it is “liar press” or luegenpresse in German … see: Breitbart Article. I guess that it was inevitable that a polarization like this would occur when militant Islamists in Europe keep pushing their agenda and the media there keeps papering over what is occurring. Eventually demonstrations, like what have occurred in Leipzig, Dresden and elsewhere in Europe, boil over and things start getting uglier and uglier on both sides.

The PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) movement in Europe and now in Germany is disturbing in many ways. It is reminiscent of the fascist anti-Semitic frenzy that characterized Germany during the Second World War with all its brutal consequences. Yet it is also in some ways similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement and anti-Ferguson police riots here in the United States … both of which were instigated and encouraged by a biased media determined to scandalize our societal norms by pushing an unrealistic agenda.

To this observer, it seems that the consequences of the Second World War are still being felt in the West’s obsession with tolerance and diversity … perhaps to a fault. There is so much diversity in Europe that many countries there are in danger of losing their national identity. And many European countries are so tolerant that they allow sharia-law “no-go” zones where non-Muslims dare not go. (Could we possibly call them “ghettos”?) Both of these over-reactions to the horrors of the last big war have created a vacuum into which Muslims have stepped. Who really knows what percentage of these Muslims are militant extremists … but it is big enough to intimidate those who aren’t.

This is obviously a dangerous situation which is also slowly creeping into the social fabric of the United States … augmented by a president and much of this nation’s luegenpresse who have not yet had the scales fall from their eyes. I actually believe that a more realistic treatment of these diversity and tolerance issues relative to our Muslim communities here would serve them far better in the long run.

But unfortunately, I don’t expect that this will occur anytime soon.

And Another Autobiographical Snippet

Coming up on my 75th birthday, I think it appropriate to post this 15 year old autobiographical snippet which also was an entry on another of my blog sites: Purple Prose:

Upon Reaching Sixty

As I am entering my sixty-first year I feel compelled to reflect on my past life and on what may be my dubious destiny. First, I am all too aware that, if I am very lucky ... given the suspicious quality of my genealogical soup, I should be thrilled to live to eighty. Thus, I am likely now three-quarters of the way through my life journey and, in the distance, I can discern that grimy station at the end of the tracks. Certainly these last twenty years are doubtful to be as rail-smooth and offer the same panoramas as my first three score. In fact, unlike the song’s “purple dust of twilight time,” my dotage will probably be awash with the choking soot of infirmity ... not a very happy thought. And when my train finally pulls into its death-depot, I likely will be fearfully frozen in my berth.

So, why the journey? How is it that I am on this pilgrimage to the worm farm? Can this all evolve from one balmy night in May, 1938 when my parents did the nasty to the strains of “Stardust” lilting out of their brown Philco radio? Does my Dad’s one wriggler and my Mom’s willing ovum beget “me?” Logically, I understand, but emotionally I am confounded. It’s akin to turning the Empire State Building upside down and balancing it on the very tip of its antenna. That one moment of conception is the pin-point fulcrum for my entire life: a massive number of happy ceremonies, bitter failures, transient joys, defining events, greasy hamburgers, loopy ideas, indulged senses, and bodily functions -- all crammed into my sixty trips around the sun. Did my Dad, now gone for almost fifty-five years, really comprehend what he was begetting that May evening? Most unlikely. Sinister Nature makes our procreation so euphoric that we aren’t tempted with consequential thoughts.

And so I was born ... into a planet reluctantly entering the Second World War. The ovens at Treblinka had yet to be built. Jet planes were only a distant, discounted idea. The first computer, Eniac, was still a maze of radio tubes and wires. And our leader in the White House was quietly hardening his arteries with the contents of his theatrical cigarette holder. The town into which I set my tiny ink-stained foot was Greensburg, Pennsylvania; a grimy mill town thirty miles east of Pittsburgh. Greensburg was built, like Rome, on seven rather steep hills. It straddled Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway ... well before the age of truck routes around towns (such “civic planning” destined to drain these towns of their life force.) Our white clapboard house was owned by my mother’s father. It was a modest home, by today’s standards, set high on the eastern hill which cast its morning shadow on the high-school football stadium and a triple set of feeder rails connected to the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The mainline itself framed the town’s northern bluff which, in turn, created the valley through which the Lincoln Highway promenaded.

My bedroom window overlooked this valley and often at night, particularly after my father had closed his eyes forever, I would sit on the edge of my bed watching the trains tightrope their way across the horizon. The wail of their steam whistles drew me to reveries of getting older and traveling to strange new places. Now, I am much older and have traveled to many strange new places. And, unfortunately, trains no longer belch coal smoke and lure dreamers with their mournful trills. It’s as though, as a young boy, I was suddenly able fly across that valley and board that train to my future. And now, having traveled well along to my destination, I yearn to be back in my old bedroom, sitting on my chenille bedspread, staring across the valley at that moving line of lights.

© Copyright, George W. Potts