Tom’s Big Picture

Top Ten Male-Bashing Ads

Make that the top ten white male bashing ads. I could theorize about this, but the most obvious explanation is that advertisers sometimes like to be funny, and that means somebody has to be the butt of the joke. However, in our politically correct age, white males are the only people left with a sense of humor who won’t boycott you if one of their group members is portrayed in a less-than-flattering light.

This propaganda is having an effect. More reason to never let your kids watch TV. This may sound extreme, but think of the most degenerate little queer screenwriter in Los Angeles, a complete hostile alien to your way of life. That’s who’s writing the scripts to everything on TV. Get a clue, invest in this thing called a DVD player and deliberately pick what they watch.

This latest post by Chris Ortiz is very brave. Click here to read his post about Anti-Southern Bigotry.

I’m not exactly a theonomist, but I do keep up with their work and am working my way through Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (it’s a great study of the Law, even if one doesn’t always agree with the degree of strictness Rushdoony wishes us to observe). The heart of Rushdoony’s work IMO is his concept of Dominion, of limiting the scope of both church and state and expanding the realm of the multigenerational extended family according to Biblical principles.

It’s important to distinguish between one’s politics and likely reality. What I mean is that one’s politics is based on some high but reasonable percentile of the possible, a lofty goal. One’s planning, however, should be for the likely reality. The following is not what I want to happen, but it is what has happened and will likely continue to happen:

This morning I had occasion to venture into a mall, a place I rarely go. Given the inhospitable summers where I live, and being out and about in the earlier morning hours with my family, we decided to go and walk around in the retail temple of American life. Indoor malls tend to attract unsavory characters with nothing better to do than loiter, but in the two hours before lunch, before most of the urban wildlife wakes from their post-nocturnal slumber, it can be a tolerable experience.

I think what shocked me today were prices. Father’s Day cards and a couple of trinkets from Hallmark: $23. A few paperbacks and a children’s book from the bookstore: $33. With a median income per wage-earner person of about $30,000, my morning outing represented four hours of labor, or 10% of someone’s workweek. In 1998 dollars (just ten years ago, and approximately where my price indexes are stuck mentally), that’s just $23,500.

What Pat Buchanan predicted fourteen years ago in his seminal work The Great Betrayal has come to pass. The American elite has abandoned any pretense of being a real nation and thus, they have killed the middle class.

Debt will sustain the trend a bit longer, but American living standards are going to drop.

Part of me sees this as inevitable. Absent a restraining force (a sense of loyalty to one’s nation or family, which Westerners seem to pathologically lack), the animal spirits of capitalism will do their job. Capitalism has succeeded in providing abundant material goods at cheap prices to masses of people. But it is also having a leveling effect.

If a Chinaman can assemble cars as well as an American at a cheaper wage (and this is especially true if their competitors are the affirmative-action-crippled unionized-spoiled-brats of GM and Ford), then if the gap is sufficient to pay for the switching costs and transportation costs of bringing goods to market, then the work will go to China. Combine this with an alienated and decadent elite in this country who would rather lose money outsourcing (as many of them do) than give their own people decent-paying jobs and the process is inevitable.

And once it starts, even paternally-minded business owners will be forced to offshore or else be driven out of business by consumers increasingly driven by price. Losing jobs makes Americans poor which makes them more price sensitive which makes companies offshore to cut costs and then Americans lose more jobs. The decapitalization of this country is occurring at a breathtaking rate. Since Bush took office, U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined 25%.

This is an important statistic because for most of world history, wealth has been distributed very unequally. Economists believe this is because of a phenomenon called information asymmetry. The most valuable roles in society are physically idle roles that specialize in information processing. Unfortunately, the genetic lottery is very unequal in its distribution of information processing skills (i.e. intelligence, with a strong non-linear component due to the winner-take-all economic law of “low price gets the sale”), thus resulting in wildly unequal distributions of wealth. This is not fundamentally unjust, just reality.

The advent of manufacturing, on the other hand, for the first time made it possible for an average person to have enough productivity to justify a middle-class wage. In a national setting with high material demand and a limited labor supply, wages can rise to just under the actual economic value of the work.

But it does not have to be this way. Open up your labor markets to an influx of people, and those wage rates will be bid down. Profits will be beat down and the temporary anomaly of a middle class will be destroyed.

This is happening in American at a pace unprecedented even by the decadent standards of the contemporary West. Europe, with all its socialist rot, is careful about preserving jobs for its people. They suffer from immigration problems as we do and also from moral degeneracy, but there is something admirable in many European countries’ genuine concern for the plight of their average people. We may disagree with some of their methods (high taxes, ugly socialism), but the elites of Europe are somewhat better than the elites of America in this regard.

This may go back to our Second Revolution of 1865. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said “Live not by lies”. Post-Lincoln, this country has tried to define itself not as a particular nation for a particular people, but as a country based on an ideology, Equality. This ideology is so evidently false that like the Soviet system before it, the elites merely mouth the politically-correct words while undermining its basis in their behavior and actions. Intel isn’t offshoring to Gambia, but to China, based on the very real inequality between the two nations of people living in those places.

The tragedy of this false ideology is that the true American nation, the Anglo-American core, is denied the use of language that could express a common interest and the means of self-defense. The elite cravenly attacks the middle classes when they attempt to organize themselves (witness the decrying of calls for immigration law enforcement as “racist”), all the while engaging in highly unequal, discriminatory practices among themselves.

Their kids will never be bussed into the ghetto and don’t even apply to the public universities where affirmative action is most rudely practiced. They rarely have to interact with the sheer incompetence and annoyance of everyday life in America these days, as more and more competent Americans are replaced with hostile foreigners in every sphere of life. When was the last time the CEO of Citibank or Microsoft stepped into a post office and came face-to-face with modern American reality?

Politically, it is our duty to continue to fight for our nation, whatever the odds. But, on a personal level, we must plan for what seems likely. I’ll paint that picture more specifically in a subsequent post.

How many raids on polygamous Muslims?  How many raids in the ghetto?

Your kids are next, says Ilana Mercer.

2. With the crummy weather and red tide situation (the little one was very attracted to the dead fish), we spent the first morning at a nice little outdoor mall. Outdoor malls seem to be the new pattern, as they deprive the riff-raff who usually frequent malls of any air-conditioned common areas to waste time and annoy others. This is very pleasant for those of us with families who wish to get our business done and go home. In any case, my girls did the Build-a-Bear Workshop. This is an incredible business, and a lesson for me that confirms what I’ve already learned in business: never underestimate what people will pay for something, and in this case especially what yuppies will pay for an “experience” for their children. They vacuum-cleaned my wallet for $66 for two made-in-China stuffed animals. But their little faces were so happy…and of course from a daddy’s perspective that’s worth it: once or twice, on vacation.

We had one of those “black swan” experiences. Northwest Florida is apparently suffering from a severe drought, yet it rains 12 inches over the two full days we’re there. Simultaneously, the annual but unpredictable red tide comes in, washing up scores of dead fish on the beach while causing respiratory irritation within 1/2 mile of the beach, for which I paid extra for a direct-on-the-beach condo. We did our best to enjoy, and for my readers a few random observations, to syndicate over the next few days:

1. The Florida real estate bubble is bursting, but right now most people are still in denial. About 30-40% of the properties on some streets are for sale, but the asking prices seem exorbitant to me, at least based on fundamentals. Compare: a $120,000 house in Houston might rent for $1200 a month. The $2 million 3-bedroom beachside condominium I rented was $300 a night, or $9000 a month, but probably more like $7500 a month when one accounts for vacancies and real estate management fees. That would imply a value of about $750,000 for the condo, max $1 million if you discount the uncommonly efficient (though aesthetically distasteful) Houston builder machines. So while it’s amusing to see a real estate bubble bust in realtime (as those of us with more frugal, long-term strategies must also suffer through this sort of silliness every few years as it moves among various asset classes), the blood is not yet in the streets. When it does, it would be nice time to buy a condo. But for my money, renting is a bargain. Most vacation home purchases seem to me not a rational way of deploying excess capital but an irrational attempt to crystallize positive vacation experiences that have everything to do with locale and personnel and little to nothing to do with ownership vs. renting.

The family and I are heading out for a little vacation the rest of this week, to the so-called “Redneck Riviera” of the Florida upper gulf coast. I thought I would share a story regarding this.

A few years ago I was discussing the real estate business with a friend of mine, an older man who had inherited a family fortune and seemed to be doing well playing the Florida real estate game. This friend of mine was from up North, but the generally likeable kind of Yankee, an unassuming Midwestern WASP from Chicago (a town historically known as a hotbead of Copperheads, and this would be especially true among the old Protestant families).

Anyway, he was sharing with me the dynamics of Florida real estate, from a sociological point of view. He basically said that there are these small little fishing villages up and down the coasts of Florida filled with likable locals and a few WASP snowbirds who prefer a small-town fishing village environment for vacation to the tasteless glitz of somewhere like Palm Beach. Eventually, though, he said, the developers come in, buy up the place, build ugly condos and lots of commercial space, which then attracts the generally distasteful population of snowbirds from places like New York and New Jersey, who ruin the zen-like calm co-existence of the locals and the genteel WASPs. So the key to small town survival and the preservation of the small-town feel, in his opinion, was enough local restrictions of development and building such that the big-city developers find buying land diseconomic. In an ironic twist, public advocacy of liberal environmentalism is really a front for the very conservative goal of keeping distasteful and unpleasant people and elements out of the idyllic fishing village.

I found this very interesting. I next shared with him that my family enjoyed vacationing in Destin, that the town tended to attract young families from the South and was definitely not distasteful like Palm Beach or Miami. Not only that, the beaches are prettier.

His comment: “Destin, well I guess it’s nice, but it’s full of crackers.” No, he wasn’t talking about Ritz or saltines. He means crackers in the pejorative sense of “poor white southerners”. I think I resemble that remark, and was surprised he would say it in front of me, knowing my background. But, then again, Yankees aren’t known for tact, even I suppose otherwise likeable ones from the Midwest.

And, with that, this cracker will see all y’all next week.

There was a time in my Christian thought when I was frustrated with theological disputes and the seeming “gaps” in the Bible on major issues. Not errors, but rather just a lack of organization might be the way to put it. The New Testament, particularly, starts off well with straightforward narratives, but then proceeds to various epistles, snapshots of theology based on the problems of local churches at the times. For example, Paul supposedly wrote three letters to the Corinthians, yet we have only the latter two. Why do we not have the first? What information might it contain?

In short, I wished the Bible were so explicit in its theology that theological disputes would be greatly reduced. I have a probabalistic mode of thinking, and on many non-essential issues I can put probabilities surrounding various doctrines. If you’d like entertainment, I can cite odds for you. For example, I think the Church of Christ people might have a point about losing your salvation, but that would also require belief in free will, so the probability of their being correct is approximately 30% (the chance of free will being correct in my view) times 40% (the chance that the “losing salvation” interpretation is correct, if one assumes free will), for a rolled average of 12% chance of correctness.

I realize I am weird for thinking this way. Having had much experience seeing precious hypotheses crushed by experimental data in my business and other pursuits, I have learned to be humble about my assumptions.

It was only recently that a particularly interesting hypothesis hit me that might explain why God would not make the Bible as theologically organized as we might prefer. It’s the same reason that continues to frustrate globalists- part of God’s Grace is His division of man into tribes and camps so that evil is compartmentalized and cannot take over the entire world.

Multiculturalism, then, can be seen as a particular evil, as it seeks to mix, and thus destroy, real diversity to create a false uniform diversity. Any chemical engineer can tell you it’s easier to mix something than take it apart- hence all of those insanely tall towers at the refineries. Thus, if the end result of multicultural mixing is a destruction of differences, then the globalists would finally have a perfect scenario for world government, which could and almost certainly would propagate a great deal of evil.

Similarly, doctrinal disputes in the Christian community prevent a Church with a false unity under a common government, a situation where evil can flourish. With legitimate doctrinal disputes, it follows naturally that there will be administrative divisions as well, ensuring that heresy is firewalled within one denomination at a time.

However, this is not to say that doctrine is worthless, or a mere hedge of protection. It is worthy of study, and good Christians should pick one and stick with it, particularly when raising children. This a particular challenge for me, as three-year-olds don’t pick up well on probability trees.

Recently a friend of mine, inspired by the catechisms of the Presbyterian Church (yeah, I know that’s a weird sounding word to Baptists like myself, but it’s really just a series of questions and answers about doctrine), decided to create a children’s catechism for use in educating his kids about doctrine. However, he modified it to focus less on particularly Reformed elements (predestination and the like), and more on the basics of the faith, as would be acceptable to most Baptists and non-denominational Christians.

I’m starting to use it with my oldest girl, and besides her thinking that the questions are actually short answer (her favorite response to question 3 is “so he could get some glory”) instead of calling for a memorized response, it’s going pretty well. With a child even older, it should be even easier.

The text document is below, feel free to copy and paste for your own use.

Non-Denominational Catechism for Young Children

Q. Who made you?
A. God.

Q. What else did God make?
A. God made all things.

Q. Why did God make you and all things ?
A. For God’s own glory.

Q. How can you glorify God?
A. By loving God and doing what God says.

Q. Are there more gods than one?
A. No, there is only one God.

Q. In how many persons does this one God exist?
A. In three persons.

Q. Who are the three persons of God?
A. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Q. Where is God?
A. God is everywhere.

Q. How long has God existed?
A. God has always existed.

Q. What does God know?
A. God knows everything.

Q. What can God do?
A. God can do anything.

Q. Where do you learn about God?
A. In the Bible.

Q. Who wrote the Bible?
A. God wrote the Bible.

Q. What is the Bible?
A. God’s Word to all men.

Q. Why is man special?
A. Man was made in the image of God.

Q. Who was the first man and woman?
A. Adam and Eve.

Q. What did Adam and Eve do in the garden of Eden?
A. Adam and Eve sinned against God.

Q. What is sin?
A. Disobeying God.

Q. Who has sinned?
A. Everyone has sinned.

Q. What is the penalty for sin?
A. Death.

Q. What should we do with our sin?
A. Repent of it.

Q. What does repent mean?
A. To turn away from our sin.

Q. Who should we trust to save us from sin?
A. Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Q. Who is Jesus?
A. Jesus is God’s Son.

Q. What three offices does Jesus have?
A. Prophet, Priest, and King.

Q. Did Jesus ever sin?
A. No, Jesus is perfect.

Q. How did Jesus pay for my sin?
A. Jesus died on the cross for me.

Q. Did Jesus stay on the cross?
A. No, Jesus was buried.

Q. Is Jesus still buried?
A. No, Jesus rose from the dead after three days.

Q. Where is Jesus now?
A. Jesus is in Heaven.

Q. Will Jesus come again?
A. Yes, on the last day at the sound of the trumpet.

Q. What will Jesus do on the last day?
A. Judge all men.

Q. Where will all men go after judgement?
A. Heaven or Hell.

Q. What is Heaven?
A. A happy place where we will be with God.

Q. What is Hell?
A. A bad place of eternal separation from God.

Q. Can you get to Heaven by being good?
A. No, good works will not get you to Heaven.

Q. Who will go to Heaven?
A. All who trust in Jesus.

Q. Who will go to Hell?
A. All who do NOT trust in Jesus.

Q. Who helps us to trust in Jesus?
A. The Holy Spirit.

Q. What does the Holy Spirit give us?
A. The Holy Spirit gives us faith.

Q. What is faith?
A. Trusting in Jesus.

Q. How do you get the help of the Holy Spirit?
A. By prayer.

Q. What is prayer?
A. Asking God for things He promised to give us.

Q. In whose name should we pray?
A. In the name of Jesus.

Q. What has Jesus given us to teach us how to pray?
A. The Lord’s Prayer.

Q. Can you repeat the Lord’s Prayer?
A.
Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy
will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And
forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the
glory, for ever. Amen. Matthew 6:9-13

Q. How many commandments did God give to Moses?
A. Ten commandments.

Q. What is the first commandment?
A. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Q. What is the second commandment?
A. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

Q. What is the third commandment?
A. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain.

Q. What is the fourth commandment?
A. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Q. What is the fifth commandment?
A. Honour thy father and thy mother.

Q. What is the sixth commandment?
A. Thou shalt not kill.

Q. What is the seventh commandment?
A. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Q. What is the eighth commandment?
A. Thou shalt not steal.

Q. What is the ninth commandment?
A. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Q. What is the tenth commandment?
A. Thou shalt not covet.

Q. What did Jesus say was the greatest commandment?
A. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.

Q. Who else should we love, other than God?
A. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

Q. Who is your neighbor?
A. Everyone is my neighbor.

Q. What are sacraments?
A. Signs and seals of God’s covenant.

Q. What is Godís covenant?
A. Godís promise to save us from sin.

Q. How many sacraments are there?
A. Two.

Q. What are the two sacraments?
A. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Q. Who appointed these sacraments?
A. Jesus.

Q. Why did Jesus appoint these sacraments?
A. To make us different from the world.

Q. What sign is used in baptism?
A. The washing of water.

Q. What does baptism signify?
A. That our sins are washed clean by the blood of Jesus.

Q. In whose name are we baptized?
A. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Q. What is the Lord’s Supper?
A. Breaking and eating bread and drinking the cup.

Q. Why do we take part in the Lord’s Supper?
A. To remember the death and suffering of Jesus.

Q. What does the broken bread represent?
A. The body of Jesus, broken for our sins.

Q. What does the cup represent?
A. The blood of Jesus, shed for our salvation.

Q. Who should partake of the Lord’s Supper?
A. Believers in Jesus.

It seems that I can’t go a day without a reminder of how proactive I must be as a parent, lest my kids accept the destructive pop culture defaults. Case in point: my wife and I live in a country subdivision, partially to have space for the kids to play (and to garden, enjoy the outdoors, etc), partially for safety, and partially for the sanity of mental separation from both the urban (non-negotiable and unacceptable) and suburban (acceptable but artificial) modes of life. Yet even out in the woods the culture comes to us.

For the first 18 months we were in our house, at least once a day (more often at night), we were treated to the experience of our windows shaking to a hip-hop beat emanating from a twentysomething young man’s Ford Ranger- you know the type who lives with their parents after high school with $3000 worth of speakers and amps in a $2000 truck. He has normal enough parents, successful upper middle class ones at that, yet he identifies culturally with 80-IQ felons and their tribal misogynistic grunts and obscenities marketed to our youth as “music”. How did this happen? How does someone who is heir to the greatest musical traditions in the world degrade his tastes to this level?

The answer is that it happened by default. Unless parents take proactive steps to displace the cultural defaults, the child will simply accept the music of his peers.

Hip-hop and rap is particularly dangerous. Here’s why, and I’ll try saying this as delicately as possible: the IQ of the target adult audience of rap and hip-hop is equivalent to your child’s at age 12, possibly younger depending on how much above average your child is. Thus, a lot of the problem with kids like my neighbor’s is early exposure to a form of “music” that is optimized for their young minds- and since it combines simplistic rhythms with a high level of aggression, it can be quite addictive for a young man experiencing the testosterone surge of early adolescence. Hip-hop and rap are naturally attractive to our children at young ages, and thus we must intervene and prevent their exposure to much of it before it’s too late.

But more than preventing listening to bad “music”, we must cultivate a taste in good music, which is pretty hard and requires some digging.

Much “Contemporary Christian” music is not much help in this regard. While fun to listen to and without the destructive messages, it does little to cultivate better taste in music. Yet many Christian parents, presumably some who homeschool, who would be horrified if their high school child were unable to read beyond a 3rd grade level, accept musical illiteracy as a matter of little concern. While some CC music is artfully done (much of my wife’s Caedmon’s Call and other similar bands is more complex lyrically than any secular music), the danger is the availability of the same illiterate grunting with a Christian label. Grunting for Jesus is still illiterate grunting, regardless of the Christian veneer, and we should expect more from our children. We also must remember that CCM is now a manufactured product owned and marketed by secular companies. We should not let our guard down because it is in a Lifeway store. And it would be an especially bad mistake to insist that this music be the only music a Christian family should listen to.

My call here is not for an elimination of CCM or non-destructive pop music (increasingly rare as the culture continues its decline, but a lot of music from the 50’s and 60’s would qualify), but for deliberateness and moderation. Reading, watching videos, music listening and any other form of media consumption are analogous to a diet, and what we read, watch, and listen to affects us. Not only that, we need to realize that, for our children, there is a finite amount of time available for reading, listening and watching. If we choose to consume one thing, we are choosing NOT to consume another. This is another example of opportunity cost.

Yet it can be daunting to begin to expose your children to better music, chiefly the broad category labeled “classical music”. There’s so much of it, it’s not well-marketed, and the jargon is confusing. In addition, many of the orchestral compositions from the 1900’s are ugly, dissonant pieces, the musical equivalent of modern art, interesting for musical theorists but painful for normal human beings to listen to.

As a person who only really started listening to classical as an adult (as recently as 2001 my musical diet consisted of mostly U2, Metallica, Creed, and the like), I thought I would share advice as to how to get started. First, it’s ok to listen to only the classical you really like. There’s nothing shameful about listening to “popular” classical pieces instead of obsessing over obscure mediocre pieces- like any hobby, the connoisseur of a given hobby is typically more interested in impressing others with trivia and knowledge of the hobby than enjoying the hobby for its own sake.

So first, I’d suggest you go to the classical section at a large store and buy a multi-disc album with a label like “100 Greatest Classical Pieces of All Time.” That will be a pretty good sample of what’s generally been well liked by a lot of people over time. Once you find a piece or composer you like, you can dig deeper into the composer’s work to find more music you enjoy.

As a general guide, I would start with piano sonatas- these are pieces that involve only the piano typically, and avoid the sensory overload of orchestral music. Beethoven is still the best IMO, and is the composer I keep returning to as the greatest, even though Wagner is my favorite (unfortunately, I don’t get to listen to Wagner much, as it is too emotionally intense for background music while I work- Wagner’s music must be listened to loud with one’s full attention- maybe I should get a massive amp and speaker system for my car and drive past ghettoboy’s house at 5 in the morning with Ride of the Valkyries turned up till my ears bleed). Chopin’s solo piano music is also excellent, esp. if you enjoy melancholy themes- you might want to avoid Chopin’s etudes, as these are pieces intended to build piano technique, not primarily for listening pleasure.

From piano pieces it is very easy to expand to violin sonatas, esp. Bach’s solo violin works. A little bit of searching on Amazon can yield a lot of leads in this area. Both violin and solo piano music make excellent background music for study and dining.

Next, you can add string quartets by various composers, as well as piano concertos, which are typically pianos backed by an orchestra. Finally, consider Beethoven’s symphonies and some Mozart and Bach masses- if you’re learning Latin at home (still undecided on this one), this can be a great exercise to look at the words of the mass, typically printed on the album insert. Beethoven’s Mass in C Minor and Mozart’s Requiem are both great starts for choral music.

If you’re deciding between pieces, I find that something in a minor key is usually much more emotionally complex and nuanced. This is an interesting phenomenon, as minor keys are “sad” in tone, yet listening to them makes us happy, even transcendent (Beethoven’s 9th being the greatest example). Most Christmas carols are in minor keys- esp. the ones that move us most powerfully, like Silent Night and Little Town of Bethlehem. There’s something about the starkness of the minor key that is comforting, esp. in these songs we sing every year.

In addition to exposing children to this great music, it’s important to cultivate a real, emotional connection to it- not as a museum piece, but real, living music that expresses the highest ideals of our civilization. Here are a few things I’m doing. First, when we listen to classical, I describe it to my girls as “pretty music.” Now the oldest one will often volunteer this (as a near three-year-old, she gives a play-by-play commentary on everything) when I turn it on. I do a couple of other things, at the risk of sounding silly, but it’s worth mentioning.

I will take great classical themes, while they’re playing, and work the girls’ names in, singing the tune. So, for example, the famous first four note theme of Beethoven’s 5th is sung to the lyrics of my youngest girl’s name, repeated over and over again as the tune progresses. Fur Elise, perhaps the most recognizable Beethoven piano piece, has its theme sung as the three-syllable name of my oldest daughter. Children are really attached to their names, and music at the toddler stage being rather abstract, this is a way to help them emotionally connect to the music. Now the oldest, when she hears Beethoven’s 5th, says “that’s baby’s song”- or will even sing it to her sister in a sotto voce, doing the best her little voice box can at imitating my baritone.

I also will make use of Chopin and Straussian waltzes (Richard Strauss was an exception among 20th century composers, in following the traditions of his German forebears in producing real classical music, as opposed to the “modern” variety- Strauss is the composer of the 2001 Space Odyssey theme, Also sprach Zarathustra), and do my awful best to “dance” with the girls, which they really seem to enjoy. The youngest, who is too young to fear anything, especially likes being dipped. The oldest will jump around herself “dancing” if the Nutcracker theme is played. Waltzes in general are wonderful light classical pieces, with a nice rhythym and pleasant melodies.

Anytime you can help small children do something active instead of passively listening, you stimulate more neurons in their sponge-like brains and make more of a permanent impact.

I also believe children should be exposed to the folk music of their culture. Country music and particularly Bluegrass are the folk music of our country (as Country/Bluegrass is the only genre that appeals to a wide age range, as opposed to pop/rock and its dependence upon rebellious youth for its marketing appeal)- not all of it is worth listening to, but if you pick and choose (hint: iTunes is esp. nice for country music, with its 30 minute albums with one good song) you can get the very best with no compromising moral messages. George Strait, Alan Jackson, Randy Travis, etc, all have good songs and bad songs, so pick the good ones (moral and appealing). As for Bluegrass, and I know I’m simplifying, but all you need to know is to order every album put out by Alison Krauss- much of it is moral and uplifting, some of it explicitly Christian.

Ok, after reading this, my editorette said that I have probably overwhelmed my audience here with suggestions (music is one of my hobbies). Let me give you a really easy way to take action on this, with two words: satellite radio, or any commercial-free radio source. Thank goodness we no longer have to listen to liberal public radio, begging for money every 20 minutes, to get good classical music. XM or Sirius both have two dedicated classical and one bluegrass station. For the most part, you can turn this on and forget about it, as neither genre will have anything very destructive that could come on by accident. Of the two (I have both), XM plays a better mix of real classical, while Sirius plays more 20th century modern junk. However, the bluegrass station on XM seems to have a lot of compression (like listening to a bad MP3), whereas the Sirius bluegrass station sounds more like a CD. So each has their ups and downs, but since I listen to much more classical than bluegrass, I would consider XM to be the superior choice. The nice thing about this option is that you don’t need to know or buy anything- just start listening. If you pay for digital cable or Dish or DirecTV, you already have CD-quality music stations which include these genres. Make use of them.

I’m not saying certain types of music must be the exclusive things we listen to, but that we should at least choose the proportions. My goal is that at least 1/2 of the music I enjoy, and 75% of what my children enjoy, be either classical or legitimate folk music. Much like the mind must be stretched before one can read full-strength literature, so must the mind be stretched to appreciate good music. Those who advocate the moral and technical equality of all forms of music are as ridiculous as someone arguing that People Magazine is equivalent to Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. Music is not some abstract cloud of personal preference, but rather has a discrete language than can be studied note by note, chord by chord (or in the case of hip-hop, grunt by grunt)- and it is anything but equal. To say so reflects a lack of knowledge or a leveling, Marxist mindset- and we should be trying to teach our children to be better, not equal.

De Toqueville’s opinion of American women and their virtues, as compared to the decadence of Europe at the time.