Tom’s Big Picture

This series has discussed the legitimacy, primacy, biological reality and even Scriptural authority for a positive loyalty and preference for the ethnocultural group in which God in His Sovereignty has placed us. As Americans, our loyalty is not to a mere “American creed” or set of abstract principles theoretically extendable to all mankind, but rather to the actual, physical American people as they existed historically and their descendents today. Our heritage as Americans is not due to our Constitution (Liberia has an almost identical Constitution, but it’s not somewhere you would want to live) but rather due to our innate biocultural capabilities combined with a historical legacy as a colony of 17th century England and the attendant conservatism of a remote colony in preserving the virtues of that era, certainly not perfect but much superior in any moral or religious measure to our current age.

Yet many of us are hesitant to express this loyalty. Why? Because of an oppressive force generally known as “political correctness”. Hispanic groups can tell us to “go back to Europe” with no media backlash. Black Muslims like Louis Farrakhan claim European peoples are the invention of a black mad scientist sequestered on a remote island who created “blue-eyed devils” as the tools of Satan; and yet, it is only Farrakhan’s wacky theories about Jews that get media attention, while his anti-European views are tolerated. But let our people ask the government to merely enforce its own laws to prevent an alien invasion and their eventual displacement, and the media censors immediately begin the predictable cry of “racist, bigot, xenophobe”. Why the double standard?

Perhaps Moses said it best, in a speech Charlton Heston gave in 1997 to the Free Congress Foundation:

I have come to realize that a cultural war is raging across our land… storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe, where we come from.

How many of you here own a gun? A show of hands?

How many own two or more guns?

Thank you. I wonder—how many of you in this room own guns but chose not to raise your hand?

How many of you considered revealing your conviction about a constitutional right, but then thought better of it?

Then you are a victim of the cultural war. You are a casualty of the cultural warfare being waged against traditional American freedom of beliefs and ideas. Now maybe you don’t care one way or the other about owning a gun. But I could’ve asked for a show of hands on Pentecostal Christians, or pro-lifers, or right-to-workers, or Promise Keepers, or school voucher-ers, and the result would be the same. What if the same question were asked at your PTA meeting? Would you raise your hand if Dan Rather were in the back of the room there with a film crew?

See? Good. Still, if you didn’t, you have been assaulted and robbed of the courage of your convictions. Your pride in who you are, and what you believe, has been ridiculed, ransacked, plundered. It may be a war without bullet or bloodshed, but with just as much liberty lost: You and your country are less free.

And you are not inconsequential people! You in this room, whom many would say are among the most powerful people on earth, you are shamed into silence! Because you embrace a view at odds with the cultural warlords. If that is the outcome of cultural war, and you are the victims, I can only ask the gravely obvious question: What’ll become of the right itself? Or other rights not deemed acceptable by the thought police? What other truth in your heart will you disavow with your hand?

I remember when European Jews feared to admit their faith. The Nazis forced them to wear six-pointed yellow stars sewn on their chests as identity badges. It worked. So—what color star will they pin on our coats? How will the self-styled elite tag us? There may not be a Gestapo officer on every street corner yet, but the influence on our culture is just as pervasive.

Now, I am not really here to talk about the Second Amendment or the NRA, but the gun issue clearly brings into focus the war that’s going on.

Rank-and-file Americans wake up every morning, increasingly bewildered and confused at why their views make them lesser citizens. After enough breakfast-table TV promos hyping tattooed sex-slaves on the next Rikki Lake show, enough gun-glutted movies and tabloid talk shows, enough revisionist history books and prime-time ridicule of religion, enough of the TV anchor who cocks her pretty head, clucks her tongue and sighs about guns causing crime and finally the message gets through: Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant, or—even worse—Evangelical Christian, Midwest, or Southern, or—even worse—rural, apparently straight, or—even worse—admittedly heterosexual, gun-owning or—even worse—NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or—even worse—male working stiff, because not only don’t you count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as delightfully green as you hand them over, but your voice requires a lower decibel level, your opinion is less enlightened, your media access is insignificant, and frankly mister, you need to wake up, wise up and learn a little something about your new America…in fact, why don’t you just sit down and shut up?

That’s why you don’t raise your hand. That’s how cultural war works. And you are losing.

…

Although my years are long, I was not on hand to help pen the Bill of Rights. And popular assumptions aside, the same goes for the Ten Commandments. Yet as an American and as a man who believes in God’s almighty power, I treasure both.

The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of those wise old dead white guys who invented this country. Now, some flinch when I say that. Why? It’s true…they were white guys. So were most of the guys who died in Lincoln’s name opposing slavery in the 1860s. So why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is “Hispanic pride” or “black pride” a good thing, while “white pride” conjures up shaved heads and white hoods? Why was the Million Man March on Washington celebrated in the media as progress, while the Promise Keepers March on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule? I’ll tell you why: Cultural warfare.

…

Americans should not have to go to war every morning for their values. They already go to war for their families. They fight to hold down a job, raise responsible kids, make their payments, keep gas in the car, put food on the table and clothes on their backs, and still save a little for their final days in dignity. They prefer the America they built - where you could pray without feeling naive, love without being kinky, sing without profanity, be white without feeling guilty, own a gun without shame, and raise your hand without apology. They are the critical masses who find themselves under siege and are long for you to get some guts, stand on principle and lead them to victory in this cultural war.

Now all this sounds a little Mosaic, the punch-line of my sermon is as elementary as the Golden Rule. In a cultural war, triumph belongs to those who arm themselves with pride in who they are and then do the right thing. Not the most expedient thing, not the politically correct thing, not what’ll sell, but the right thing.

As an aside, I find it interesting that Heston brings up the Promise Keepers march on Washington. Indeed it was ridiculed by the media, in cruel ways, stereotyping a gathering of Christian men as just a bunch of dorky white guys wanting to beat their wives into submission. While I have my own reservations about Promise Keepers leadership that I won’t go into here, the instincts of the participants are commendable: men wanting to turn their hearts towards home. I remember watching the march on C-SPAN, and there was one particular part that turned my stomach: a bizarre ritual of “racial reconciliation” that involved a white guy on his knees, surrounded by representatives of other races (complete with an American Indian in full headdress, looking more like The Village People than any Indian you see in real life these days) who were standing around him, while the white guy prayed for God’s forgiveness for the sins of his race in America against Hispanics, Indians and African Americans. But it was the white guy and the white guy only who prayed for forgiveness- no prayer of forgiveness for Mexican slaughters of Anglos at Goliad and the Alamo, no prayer of forgiveness for the thousands of women and children mercilessly murdered by American Indians, and no prayer of forgiveness for African Americans’ disproportionate interracial crime rates. I will restrain myself from describing the myriad theological problems with the whole episode.

This incident is exactly the phenomenon Heston hit on- the cloud of oppression where we want to please the media and the cultural elites with apologies for who we are. And yet, what did this ritual buy the Promise Keepers leadership, who were obviously nervous about the fact that their openly multiracial group overwhelmingly consisted of white men? It only bought them contempt from the media. We must realize that our enemies can never be placated or pleased- but like a battered woman in a co-dependent relationship, Promise Keepers keeps on believing they can somehow justify themselves by trying to please the media.

In his speech, Moses was describing the cultural war, but specifically a psychological war, the dirtiest kind of war that deprives men and women of the sanctity of their own thoughts and opinions. And there we see the practical task before us: Like a Twelve-Step Program, we must admit and recognize that we are victims of this war, seek to rehabilitate ourselves from its effect, and most importantly, shield our children from it in their formative years and give them a cultural immune system that will enable them to fight off psychological pathogens once they enter the outside world on their own.

Once freed from the psychological disease of political correctness, the ethnocultural loyalties I advocate will occur naturally, or at least can be taught and internalized with little resistance as a logical extension of the family itself.

So, without further ado:

Tom’s Practical Suggestions for Recovering Victims of Political Correctness to Heal Psychological Wounds and Break the Cycle of Guilt and Oppression for Your Children

1. The media’s main distribution vehicle for mass-consumed politically correct propaganda is television. Turn off the TV. Cancel the cable. Your cable bill sends about 25 to 50 cents per month to every channel on the dial, whether you watch it or not. So you’re subsidizing the filth whether you want to or not. There’s not a whole lot of downside to getting rid of cable once you get over withdrawals: higher quality family time without the tube on all the time (I’ve noticed some people who mute the TV and leave it on all the time, like a security blanket or something), higher SAT scores for your kids since they’ll have to read for entertainment, and more sex. Seriously, studies have shown that TV’s in the bedroom reduce sex frequency between husbands and wives.

2. Ok, I realize most of you won’t implement #1. I’m a hypocrite as well on it, but I thought I’d throw it out there as an ideal. Here’s what we did: we cancelled our cable in 2005. We signed up with Dish Network; there’s even a “family friendly” package that is $20 a month (though not all of the channels, like Nickelodeon, are necessarily healthy). We also got a DVR, where we record shows like a TIVO. Second, and most importantly, we put the Dish Netword receiver on one and only one TV: the one right in front of our exercise equipment. In our house, you must at least be building your temple while you rot your mind.

3. Ok, so maybe #2 is not something you want to do either. At least do the following. Get a DVR, whether Dish or Tivo or whatever. I think a lot of our consumption of unhealthy propaganda is due to mindless viewing of whatever’s on. Now, most people don’t want to watch propaganda, but they will watch it if it’s the best thing on at any given time. A Tivo or digital video recorder allows you to record hours and hours of relatively harmless content (like my wife’s decorating shows, or my shows about “Modern Marvels”, exciting documentaries about concrete, plastic, metal and the like). My recorder has more shows of pretty harmless content than my wife or I could ever watch. In addition, you can skip commercials pretty easily, which will reduce your credit card bill by reducing your exposure to want-inducing messages of materialism (believe me, advertising works- I spend a lot of money on it, and not for my health). Now remember, I said the content is relatively harmless, but it’s not edifying either. So instead of consuming media toxins, you are now consuming the equivalent of table sugar, not healthy for sure, but not harmful in moderation. Even some of the “harmless” content will have trace levels of toxin- for example, a documentary about Texas had the obligatory politically correct hand-wringing about slavery. At least in that situation, with a DVR, you can hit the pause button, explain to your children the problem with what they just heard, and start again. If we talk back to our TV’s in our children’s prescence, the damage is mitigated; in fact, being a critical consumer of media content is an important skill to teach to our children.

4. Never, ever let your children watch content from television without your supervision. Even with a DVR, your children may be tempted to watch the commercials. And for goodness sake, don’t let them watch “children’s” programming. Media mogul Sumner Redstone, born Murray Rothstein, owns Viacom, which in turn owns Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and MTV. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are designed to produce future consumers of MTV. Do not be so gullible as to trust an anti-Christian corporation to determine appropriate media content for your children. Your preferred medium for children’s content should be the DVD, where you are in absolute control of a closed circuit on the content. There’s no way they’re going to see a Spongebob commercial while watching Veggietales.

5. Build an extensive DVD collection of healthy content and share your content with others (I leave the means for the latter deliberately vague). I will soon start a project of building a list of appropriate DVD’s on this site.

6. Much of the “science” of psychology is actually pseudoscience. However, there is one psychological therapy technique that is almost universally useful: exposure therapy for curing phobias. If someone is afraid of snakes, they can be cured by handling snakes, almost guaranteed. Similarly, political correctness has made us afraid of our past as a people and culture. We need to dig around in the past, particularly in those areas deemed “forbidden” and “evil” by the media, to discover the truth. As a Southerner, this means, for example, I need to know everything I can about The War Between the States, Reconstruction and the Redemption (i.e. the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments) that I can, from original sources, or at least older sources. I need to know the past as it was, from the people who lived in it, and not from self-appointed censors in our current age.

7. We need a general exposure to our civilization’s heritage. Read good literature, listen to good classical music, and enjoy poetry from the past when poems were real art instead of self-indulgent raw feeds of randomness and obscenity from some idiot’s subconscious.

8. In regards to #6 and #7, it is apparent that we must read to accomplish these things. In music and reading, there is a somewhat painful process of stretching the mind that is required before finer things can be appreciated. It’s worth it. Once you begin to enjoy the “higher bandwidth” cultural offerings of our past, you’ll feel like something’s missing in mass-marketed media. But it does take some effort to read. I will also start media lists of music and books on this site. My own experience reading good books is fairly recent, so I can offer some suggestions.

9. In the blog format, one experiential thing I can do for my audience appropriate to the blogging medium to help with #6 and #7 is featuring poetry and prose excerpts from the past. The Internet is perfect for short-format poems- I will begin a weekly poem and prose feature soon, with poems and excerpts from important historical works that will help recovering victims of political correctness.

10. If you’re homeschooling your children, be careful with your curriculum. As anything you pick will be superior to most private and public schools, do not let that comfort blind you to the opportunity cost if a curriculum relies on a pre-digested textbook format to teach history, music, art and the like. I notice some of the large homeschool curriculum sources making overtures to multiculturalism, which is almost as destructive in a Christian context as a secular one. We should prefer a curriculum that is heavy on original sources instead of “interpretation” in a textbook written under the political pressure of our time. Older textbooks are preferable to newer ones. I believe our children have a lot of “heavy lifting” to do in restoring our civilization, and only a fully confident worldview in their culture, people, faith and family will give them the intestinal fortitude to do whatever is necessary in the face of our politically correct opposition.

I’m sure there are more suggestions than these, but I will stop at ten and discuss additional ideas in additional posts.