BMEWS
 
Death once had a near-Sarah Palin experience.

calendar   Friday - April 27, 2012

Friday Fizz

I’m halfway through that advance copy of Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Cliches. Wow, what a great read. A fair part of it is a bit over my head because I neither have the Liberal Arts degree from a Jesuit college that he seems to, nor have I been reading National Review for the past 25 years. So when he delves into detail about Liberal roots, citing behaviors based on the tenets of philosophers like Hegel and Rousseau, dropping in untranslated “famous” Latin phrases, or casually mentioning what Buckley wrote about so-and-so in 1958 because he seems to assume we already knew ... I’m a bit lost, and come away feeling a little patronized. But those parts are in the minority, and the book does force you to think, and it’s one you absolutely will want to talk about. I think this is a book you will pass along to your Red State friends, and it’s certainly one you’ll want to read at least twice.

He has done what I’ve purposely avoided, which is to climb inside the Leftist mind and find out what makes it tick, back to Napoleon, Darwin, Spencer, and Marx etc. For myself, if the wind is right I can tell if the field ahead has horse apples in it, and I’ll just detour around. Goldberg jumps into the manure piles headfirst, identifies every grain of hay, grass, and oats, and jumps to the conclusion that the horse was piebald. And you read it, sit back and think a little, and realize he’s right. But a few little bridges, an extra paragraph or two between the analysiseses and the take-aways couldn’t hurt. Most of the rest of us aren’t so deep into the liberal dynamic to make those leaps with confidence. His whole intellectual and historical approach to decipher the statist ideology is enlightening, more so because he’s performing it on a group that these days claims to have neither history nor ideology. Obvious non-truth; they are bound lockstep to an unflinching ideology only slightly more flexible than Islam, one that hides behind stolen meanings, cliches that turn out to be logical fallacies, and various corruptions of history. At this point in the book it feels like the author is gentle enough not to believe that they are putting up a false front but actually believe the cliches, myths and ideology-free pragmatic ideology themselves. Ann Coulter, with her books Godless and Slander behind her, would not be hesitating to make the claim that the left knowingly does this all as a power grab because they have the temerity and arrogance to truly believe the rest of us can’t see through their BS, because they have the worldview of very small dishonest children. I’ll read to the end and see if he reaches that same conclusion, which is a bit ancillary to the theme of the book itself.

It’s also a fun read. I like his style. If you could get Ann Coulter to put down her shtick for a few minutes, slow down a little, dilute the venom in her inkwell 75%, and stop reaching for the rimshot every paragraph, she’d write just like Jonah Goldberg. He skewers the Left too, but in a softer and quieter way. Is it a Must Have for your Conservative library? Not sure yet, but it’s certainly a good one to add to your Wish List.

image

We got creamed in bowling leagues. Both of them. By ringers. Sand baggers. I’m not upset; that’s just how it goes. Both my teams bowled our best, but we were outscored. That’s how this game is played. So I want to become good enough so that I can suck. In other words, I want to be able to roll at a level consistently below my ability, and be able to just win with that, and save the real stuff for the finals when it’s needed. Come on; the guy we played against on Cheap League was grinning the whole time, him and his “220” average, while he threw 9 strikes in a row for a 257 in the first game, then started the second game with an open only to strike his way through the remainder for another game of exactly 257, at which point he goofed off and gave us a “sympathy lay” to let us win the third game. But not the wood; even though we were up more than 120 pins halfway through the 10th frame and needed only 67 to take it. No, he and he fellow co-anchor pulled out 6 in a row EACH to finish up, which gave us the win by just 54, so no wood. Greed League was even worse, because there was no doubt we’d been bagged there. F’s team took us by 100+ each game and we all bowled well over average ... yet somehow we were giving the other guys handicap points, just like the baggers in Cheap League. It’s a pretty slick trick, and it’s how you win. And I want to be that good.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 04/27/2012 at 01:37 PM   
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