Beck says all these head-nodding things. Then we get to the not-so-much or even the uhm, no, parts. Although somewhat less so (because he tries to be more inclusive, presumably), the same can often be said about Obama’s writing.
Beck is inflammatory with statements like, “Now our government, the instigator of our problems…”
Beck is right that people shouldn’t be punished for prudence, planning, sacrifice, and hard work, while those who do the opposite get compensated. For indeed, where’s the lesson in that? Except perhaps a perverse one?
Beck’s warnings that we should rage against the idea that the state grants us our rights are correct. Whenever, we, in our ignorance, speak things like “The government lets me…” or “The government says I can…” or “The government gave me the right to…” a hundred ghostly voices shout if we could only hear them. They are the voices of our Framers, and of John Locke. And their ghostly voices silently scream to us: “The government doesn’t GIVE you ANYTHING! YOU give the government everything that it has, everything that it is. ALL rights are yours, and you decide which ones to give to YOUR creature, YOUR creation, the government, so it can operate!” And across wide lands they extend their ghostly hands through their graves, and extend their middle fingers in defiance and rage that we could so easily forget and not care that rights come from the people up, not the government down.
Beck trumpets the individual, and decries the communal that he sees as enforced. The truth awaits, as it usually does, in the balance. Excessive individualism has cost this country, this society, this civilization, a great deal. Excessive communalism, whether corrupted or not, has also cost a great deal. Our Framers properly recognized that the freedoms of the individual should be high on the list of priorities. And yet they, even as unenlightened as they were in comparison to the native Americans on the issue, still recognized that there are responsibilities to the community, even the larger state and national community. They used terms like “the common good,” that have become out of vogue in many circles today.
Beck also, deliberately or not, conflates several issues concerning bearing arms. First, many scholars feel that the Framers largely expected that the majority of adult males of prime fit age (15-45) would be in the militia, whether it be in the regular drilling militia or in the infrequently drilling muster militia, and that militia members would keep them in their homes. We don’t have this militia participation today, although perhaps we should.
Second, Beck implies that ANY weapon is just as proper to possess as another. A little thought will see the illogic of that position. Comparisons to Canada have some benefit, but are often limited, given that Canada has large territory (larger than the U.S.) but relatively sparse population (only slight more than 1/10th of the U.S.’s).
The lack of both community and sense of collective good, both of which were valuable to the Framers, magnifies dangers in individual weapon possession and use. The maddening and often idiotically clumsy attempts by state and local governments to deal with this by procedures is often a failure, however. And guns and ammunition sales may very well be a “trust indicator,” as he says. Yet it is not only about the government. When people trust BOTH their government AND their fellow people, then gun and ammunition sales will go down. Infringing on 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms is wrongheaded and needlessly antagonistic. It’s endpipe focused instead of beginning at the beginning.
Beck is smart-bomb accurate in pointing out the internment of Japanese-Americans, although it is a bit conflated with the gun argument he is making. The internment is such a black stain, one brought on by excessive and irrational fear, and what’s worse, its lessons have still not sunk in all that well. And Beck is right that we need to remember that the Constitution is just a piece of paper unless we the people know it, value it, and demand its adherence. Whenever we let our fear (which usually turns out to be unfounded, at least in degree) get the best of us, we dilute and pollute our supposed values, and diminish ourselves in the process.
Beck is also dead-on right in pointing out the Supreme Court’s absurdly ruinous decision about eminent domain used for private interests, which to constitutional scholars clearly goes against the constitution. Yet he turns this into a tirade against government itself, instead of the big business interests that are being served. He also does not mention the equally ruinous decision to grant free speech to corporations, and their ruling that money is a form of free speech, which also served big business interests. But Beck can be given a pass because the decision may not have been finalized before his book went to press.
Beck rightly portrays John Adams’s comments on private property. He misleads a bit on Karl Marx’s. While Marx certainly believed in communal ownership, the contextual and period circumstances that spurred him to believe that deserve mention. He was front-row seat to some of the worst exploitation by Robber-Capitalism and how “private ownership” became a vehicle for its own version of twisted and selfish oppression.
Beck has agreement from me on mandatory blood screening tests. Unless someone can point it out to me, I don’t see the imperative. I see the logic in getting the state to convince parents of the need, but see no reason for mandating.
Beck gets his own hypocrisy banner for not condemning warrantless wire-tapping of Americans. While I agree that there is too much monitoring of the kind he condemns, the need always magnified because we have become a very un-communal society, he needs to speak out against that done previously.
Similarly, rightfully pointing out the excesses of the state in New Orleans, and that “Progressives” justify things because they feel they work for a higher authority than the public or the Constitution: he needs to condemn just as strongly when the same justification was used in the aftermath of 9/11.
Beck says that the people will “have the back” of any politician who tells the truth. What does that mean? How can the people have the pol’s back when big business controls the media and what is said, what is manipulated? An honest politician often gets little media-time if the big business group dislike him or her. Indeed, if the politician threatens the consortium in any meaningful way, that politician is targeted for removal.
Beck dismisses too freely controlling interests. While railing against government, he pooh-poohs that controlling interests could actually be manipulating that government. Except, of course, for what he terms “the Progressives.”
Beck seems to hate nuance, which means he hates complicated realities. The maddening Nanny State agenda exists, and so does the equally maddening Corporatocracy. Sometimes they fuse, sometimes they diverge, sometimes they are merely irrelevant to each other.
I am in deep sympathy with Beck about our wildly off-focus (mis)education system. But once again he takes a quote out of context to make his point. When Woodrow Wilson said that education should make students unlike their fathers, he was referring to stepping up many levels from basic education or even no education, and expanding consciousness and awareness. He wasn’t talking about some mind-bending reprogramming, the fear of which has become a staple in too many pundit circles.
Beck correctly points out the ruinous foolishness of learning primarily based on children’s own experiences and feelings and of being “equal participants” with their teachers. But it’s a bit non-sequitir to then pick out some particularly weak urban school systems’ high school diploma rates and prove…what? Even the school systems with high diploma rates often fail in having that mean anything—their students are often no better in most of the relevant skills of critical thinking, comprehension, and preparation for a college education.
Beck also says that Progressives “don’t view parents as partners in the learning cycle.” That is only at most partly true. Many school systems want parental involvement—indeed, they often require far more parental involvement than was the case 50 years ago when there was greater community and more confidence and respect across the board in all areas. But the systems sometimes struggle in getting the parental involvement—parents are that overburdened. And Beck says that parents focus on test scores and report cards. Yes, they do, and often to the detriment of learning, which often has nothing to do with statistics. In our disconnected society, where the nuclear family feels semi-isolated and under siege, parents, often backed by lawyers, don’t respect educators but instead make DEMANDS on teachers and school systems, and often assume the teachers and systems are against their child. They rescue their children from both reality and consequences, and so grade inflation is propelled forward to the deep detriment of learning and merit.
Beck likes to trumpet that the all-powerful and invasive state is taking away parental control and transferring it to the state. Yet that flies in the face of the actual evidence, which is actually incredibly mixed. Some parental control IS degraded (how many parents alter their desired decisions and actions because of fear of DFS or something else? Probably too many.) Yet helicopter parents are often SO involved/directing in their children’s lives, it is often the reason that the children stay child-like long past the age when they should have begun transitioning or even have transitioned to adulthood.
It is the overreaching that tarnishes Beck. I can agree with part of what he says about indoctrination of kids. I think that children have been indoctrinated by the educational and social systems into, among, other things, excessive and irrational fear of adult males, disrespect for adults in general, stultification of critical thinking, dysfunction about the nature of males, disconnection from cause and effect, and excessive focus on job preparation at the expense of citizenship. But this excessive political correctness is more abysmal than sinister, more the kind of frustrating bureaucratic group-think than Nazi-like doctrine. But there are instances, and they deserve our deep derision.
Yet to suggest that “it takes a village to raise a child” means the community will decide what the child is taught is or how he or she is raised, is either overreaching or purposely impugning the worst. Assisting does not mean deciding. This African saying merely recognizes that there is a communal responsibility to look after children and assist with their formation, rather than just ignore and let the nuclear family struggle. It means that when parents aren’t around, there is respect for and knowledge and interconnection concerning the adults of the community, to REINFORCE the teachings of the parents. Beck’s obvious disgust with Hillary Clinton (and all liberals or “progressives”) frequently blinds him to any good qualities those may have, and furthermore, causes him to assume the worst or even invent the worst possible explanation to anything that comes from them.
Beck correctly derides this facet of treating students as “friends” (a phenomenon that morphed to the home as well). And he is correct that it has had a deleterious effect on the workplace when the competitiveness and hard work often needed is lacking. The beneficial cooperative aspects that might balance this are often overshadowed by the selfishness and disconnection too often prevalent.
Beck and others like to imagine that return of local control of education would be a panacea. It would both help—and not. The poor state of lowest-denominator, blankly uncontroversial and utterly boring textbooks arises from stifling local control, not the opposite. And much perpetual inequity and ignorance has been perpetuated by stifling local control. But he is right that state and federal interference has also often been detrimental.
The maddening reality of extreme and excessive complication is what makes both Beck and the “Progressives” who criticize him right at the same time. We get the worst of all worlds because we are both hamstrung and our own worst enemies. We perpetuate systems we don’t like and that don’t serve us well. We have too much parental control—and too little. We have too much bureaucratic interference and even control—and too little control by teachers. We have bad apples that never get booted. We have good apples that never get unfrustrated. We have too much demanded of students—and too little. We have too many resources expended—and too little.
This phenomenon can be extended to much of the whole polarizing show: both “liberals” and “conservatives” can point to valid criticisms of the same system. Their errors come in failing to see complexity, but instead bleating out platitudes and simplistic overreaching notions that blame EVERYTHING on the other “side.”
Excessive fear of being part of a larger community, including a world community, can also blind one to possibilities. Beck criticizes the rights of children to “education and health care; programs that develop their personalities and talents, and the opportunity to grow and develop in an atmosphere of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality, and solidarity. “(93) He lauds that the US has joined the failed state Somalia as the only two nations NOT ratifying the U.N. Convention that supports the quoted above principles. In a world where children are often an exploited or neglected commodity, one might think that paying at least lip service to the principles would be laudatory, but Beck sees only sinister “control” by outside entities or that it is all “nothing more than an effort to break down the cohesion and structure of the parent/child relationship while also migrating power to a national or global entity.” (93)
This is part of a larger pattern in the American psyche: while Americans think it proper that international standards, Geneva Conventions, international war crimes tribunals, trade agreements, laws of the high seas, voting procedures, etc. be enforced or at least observed, all that melts away when it is the American government or system that might be out of line. We think nothing of demanding that the international community emplace observers (including Americans) in foreign elections to determine and ensure fairness, for example, but to suggest that foreigners be allowed to observe American elections is hypocritically denied categorically (and raises suspicion that we might have something to hide as well). We think nothing of American troops, officials, contractors, corporations, etc. going anywhere they want, even setting up residency in disregard of sovereignty or culture. Yet to intimate even a token of that in reverse is rejected immediately as infringement on our sovereignty, with the cry going up that we are trying to be dictated to by foreign entities.
What is ironic about all that is that the day is coming for our comeuppance. As we make ourselves weaker and weaker, and as we arrogantly and utterly selfishly trample or exploit others overseas, as we demand rules of others but hypocritically refuse to abide by them ourselves, we breed seething resentment that will blowback one day on us in continuous cascade, instead of just the occasional blowback as happens now.
The assumption is always that the entire international community is wrong when it dares to criticize the US or point out our hypocrisy. Yes, sometimes the international community IS wrong on some point or points, but to think that it’s all just the sort of mindless bloc voting that characterized much of the 1970s, is to be stuck in a past that bears little resemblance to present reality.
Beck points to the Kyoto Treaty, which we didn’t ratify under Bush, as an example of something we should be proud we didn’t do. The Kyoto Treaty was a flawed instrument, yes. It demanded too little of China and India. Yet that is smokescreen for why we didn’t ratify it. We didn’t ratify it because it demanded much of us, the consumer of one-fourth of the world’s energy. To the international community, it merely looked as if the hypocrite didn’t want to face up to the reality of being the biggest consumer with the biggest responsibility.
We spout off about advancing “justice” in the world, but we ourselves could not, would not, submit to the justice of the world, rightly fearing a karmic verdict. Any impartial alien observer would say we have rigged the rules in our and our trade system partners’ favor. Not the whole of us, perhaps, but certainly our multinationals.
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