My View
BY DON SORCHYCH | APRIL 15, 2015
• Microphones are there to use
• Conservative as Counterculture
• Pay back?
I attended the Cave Creek council meeting on Monday, April 6 and it was joy to have a majority of four individuals as new council members rather than a slate. Linda Bentley covered what happened so I have only a comment: Use that microphone!
Only Councilmen Dick Esser, Ernie Bunch and Mark Lipsky brought the microphone to a couple of inches from their face. Even people with better hearing than mine complained. I have a hearing aid in my left ear due to years of shooting and I could see that other people in the audience were struggling to hear as well.
There is a lot to be accomplished in Cave Creek and the six that are on council now can be trusted to take the stench out of town hall left by Interim Town Manager Rodney Glassman and the slate that hired him.
Conservatism
There was an interesting article in the March 9, 2015 issue of National Review titled, “Conservatism as Counterculture.”
Author Shelby Steele was asked to make remarks to an audience of a charitable organization.
He spoke of a visit a small village in Niger and the chief in flowing robes who praised the people (from USA) who had come from afar to help his people.
This led Steele to use the term “American exceptionalism.” There were immediate boos, but polite boos, from one side of the room. Steele felt the booing was stating a liberal view that exceptionalism was a right wing view that didn’t accept there were American past sins.
Steele felt that if he had sneered a little about America he would have elicited cheers from the same people who booed.
From this Steele concluded, “... that in the culture war between liberalism and conservatives that followed the tumultuous 1960s, liberalism won. That is liberals won the moral authority, the power, to set terms of social relations among Americans – the manners, the protocols, the ideas of decency, the rules establishing how people must interact within the most diverse society in human history. Liberalism gave America a new ‘correctness’ that enforced these new rules with the threat of stigmatization.”
Steele gives accurate examples of the heavy hits on America by liberals. He speaks of the liberal programs which have treated blacks as an underclass creating a situation where affirmative action has an underlying assumption that blacks are somehow inferior. Black women get tax payer’s money for having children and a majority of black families have absentee fathers.
I have a grandson who was an A student. He graduated from a famous university but was turned down by his home college. In addition to being a top student, while in college he took a job working with ambulatory teenagers, hunting with them and caring for them. He joined a medical mission to give aid to poor people in South America. He worked to save money to go on to medical school.
A doctor friend who taught in that college investigated the rejection. He was told that the applicant’s parents made too much money and he wasn’t a minority. Would you go to a doctor that got his degree because he was a minority? I wouldn’t and I am still infuriated by his liberal-tarnished rejection. But then what conservative wouldn’t feel that way?
Steele speaks of “Movement Conservative.” He explains: “A great irony that slowly emerged out of the turmoil of the 1960s is that conservatism became the new counterculture – a movement that was subversive in relation to the established liberal culture order. And, continuing this irony, liberalism became the natural home of timid conventionalists and careerists people who find it hard to know themselves outside the orthodoxies of mainstream ‘correctness.’ And what is political if not an establishment of orthodoxy?”
Steele’s final paragraph is worthy and worth giving considerable thought:
“This connection of conservatism to America’s hypocritical past is American Left’s greatest source of authority. However trenchant conservatism may be on issues, however time tested and profound its principles, this liberalism always works to smother conservatism insights with the poetic truth that conservatism is mere cover for America’s evil. This ability to taint conservatism – its principles, policies, and personalities – with America’s past shames has been, for the Left, a seemingly font of power.”
There are countless thoughts by Steele– far too many to fit in my editorial. There is much more you can read by getting this issue of National Review. Even better, Steele has authored “Shame” which I have ordered.
Turnabout?
A friend who has been printing in newspapers for years gave me advice. He asked a question, “Since people, especially ones who have felt the sting of your watchdog nature, have bothered to threaten potential advertisers to not show up on your pages as an advertiser, I always wonder why you didn’t print all the businesses that don’t advertise and suggest customers go to your advertisers rather than those who choose to be intimidated.”
It was indeed an interesting thought. Tell me what you think.
