Maybe, Just Maybe

This is one of the most concise summaries of last year's and this year's presidential election shenanigans. Be forewarned, there is a bit of crude content about two-thirds of the way through, but I think the overall message is worth it.

That's What She Said, Mr. Romney.

It has taken me a while, but I've finally figured something out that has been bothering me for a while. I knew that Mitt Romney reminded me of someone, someone I knew I disliked, but could not think of who that someone was. Now I remember, and it makes enough sense that it is rather scary.

Mitt Romney, you remind me of Michael Scott, the pandering and hyper-socially-sensitive boss of the fictional paper company Dunder-Mifflin.

The overarching theme of Michael Scott's life (besides finding a woman who can stand him long enough to marry him) is the pursuit of the good opinion of others. He is obsessed with being liked for who he thinks he is (and is usually not in reality.) The situation calls for a cool and hip game of basketball with the mostly-black warehouse crew? He'll don a backwards baseball cap and blame his inability to shoot a basket on the net. He has to motivate his team to make a big sale? He'll make a video of himself talking gibberish about sales and motivation and awesomeness with himself as the star.

The result is Ricky Gervais-typical humorous awkwardness, an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of the audience's collective stomach that they will simultaneously never know this man at all and also that his soul is laid bare for all to inspect. Michael Scott is simple in the midst of the complexity he surrounds himself with. He wants to be friends with everyone, to be everyone's buddy, to be loved and revered by all. His actions achieve the exact opposite on most occasions; he is not respected or revered precisely because in the end he is nothing by trying to be everything.

Although every politician does this to some degree in order to increase their appeal, I have detected this same quality to an even more disturbing degree in the current front-runner of the GOP. Mitt Romney so desperately wants to be liked and loved that he will do most anything to make it happen. Like trying to dress in a "folksy" manner by wearing blue jeans instead of his normal suit, or talking about his dad's working class roots with a weird story about spitting nails, etc. They all contribute to an unflattering overall image of more than usual dependency on the current trend.

But then again, his stance on just about every issue displays that same sort of dependency. He was against guns, and then was all for guns; he disliked tax cuts before he claimed he supported them; has been on both sides of the fence about gays and marriage; has roundly condemned the work in stem cell research after giving it the thumbs up earlier. The list goes on and on.

He deserves little respect as a presidential candidate precisely because he is so half-baked. You can't like or dislike him, hate or love him, because in the end he is kind of nothing.

Much as I dislike bumper stickers, I have had an idea for a Romney sticker for a while now, and the impetus to create it only gets stronger by the day. It would simply say, "Vote for me! I've stood for your position at least once!" Or it might as well just say, "Vote for me! I'm the only candidate that has stood for every position at least once."

Even Obama couldn't make that second claim...

A Meandering Introduction to Distributism

Good literature is many times discovered in the oddest places and at the oddest times. What I mean by “good” literature is the stuff that sticks with you long after you've read it, the kind of writing that you can recall passages of from memory because it jarred you out of your mental lethargy and into the bright light of self-reflection. Whether that jarring was humor, or pathos, or drama, it woke you up. I was exposed to such a book about thirteen years ago, when I was still in grade school, when my mother was trying to find a good book for me and my brother to read for class. I had never heard of the book she picked. It was titled The Phantom Tollbooth.

It wound up being one of the most fantastic reads of my life, and continues to give me pleasure even now that I am grown and married. It is the story of a young boy who is suddenly removed from a mundane life in our world and thrust into a world that literally embodies figures of speech and mathematical abstracts. This other world is made up of two kingdoms, the kingdom of letters and the kingdom of numbers, which are at odds with each other because each kingdom insists that they encapsulate the whole of truth and need no one else. These two kingdoms had been simpatico at one point, before the twin princesses of Rhyme and Reason were whisked away and all hell broke loose. Now everyone's only hope is to rescue the two princesses or the world will remain divided forever.

Now, I am aware that readers, book reviewers, critics, fans and the like are fond of putting intent into the work they are presented with. It is easy for some to call Tolkien's Lord of the Rings a simple analogy for the spiritual life, easier still to claim that Hamlet can be handily dissected using the methodology of one Sigmund Freud. I am not attempting here to tack any of my own meaning onto a beloved work, only to show a very strong parallel between the book and an overarching issue of our times that remains oddly absent from the national spotlight.

How could a children's book about a little boy and two kingdoms at odds possibly reflect the state of our nation? Well, we'll start with the two kingdoms part.

The term “partisan” has dominated the news recently, with headlines such as “partisan bickering” and “hyper-partisan atmosphere” rising to the top of the stack. All that those terms really mean is that there is a massive ideological fault-line between two very well staked-out camps. The simple divisions arrange themselves across this fault-line in roughly this fashion: liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, socialist vs. capitalist. One side believes in the unfailing right of the people to demand the wealth and happiness they want from the government and, by extension, from their fellow men. The other side believes in the unfailing right of the people to duke it out in order to reach the top of an exclusive pile of wealth and happiness, sometimes at the expense of their fellow men.

Both of these “sides” will not only defend their respective lines in the sand with great vigor, but they will also demand that all who wish to be good, engaged citizens of this nation pick a side. They frame the argument as a simple 'one or the other' choice. It is either light or darkness. You must choose. And when you choose, you will be welcomed heartily by one side and energetically damned by the other. The Phantom Tollbooth does a wonderful job of capturing this same divide, as the kings of both sides try desperately to convince the little boy that their position is the best. Each king casts the other as some sort of radical: believing only in words is ludicrous for the king of numbers, and putting one's faith solely in numbers is preposterous for the king of letters.

And the funny thing is, both kings are right. And both are wrong at the same time. Each casts the other as a radical because each realizes the other clings to only a portion of the truth and has run with it. The thing they each fail to realize, however, is that they themselves also cling to only a portion of the truth and have run with that portion to the detriment of the rest. The same is true with our nation. For example, conservatives see the hypocrisy of jet-set liberals who claim they are champions of the poor, and liberals recognize the injustice of their opponents' support of huge, faceless corporations who hire and fire people without a thought in the world to the actual welfare of those same people. Each sees in the other the darkest example of all that is evil, and yet will never step back long enough to examine themselves for any wrongdoing. One side deifies power, the other side deifies the hard-working self.

It would seem not many people believe there is a third option, but there must be. Political power dies with either the person holding said power or the system that created that power. A very finite god indeed. The honest, hard-working self also dies when either a man loses all willingness or ability to work, or loses his actual physical life. Also a very finite god. We are a species that knows instinctively that there are some things which last, even if we do not know what they are. So there must be a third way.

The third option is paralleled wonderfully in The Phantom Tollbooth when the little boy finally rescues the princesses Rhyme and Reason. First he shows the two kings how they actually are one and the same because they have both agreed to disagree and therefore are in agreement. But his reconciling of the two kings is not enough to save the two kingdoms. There remains the necessary outside impetus of the twin princesses to restore actual order and peace. It is only through their reintroduction to the world that sanity returns and all is made right.

The same is true in real life. Not only must both sides find how their two extremes can be melded into a coherent middle ground, but life in general and the political dialogue in particular must be reintroduced to their respective purposes. Politics has become an end in itself, a game played for the amusement of a few and the horror of many others. Life has done the same, transforming into a festival of pleasure knowing no healthy bounds and destroying the weakest among us in its headlong pursuits. The world, but more especially we, must be changed.

Pardon my romantic meanderings, but the subject I am leaping into is no small subject. We are talking about what both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party instinctively want, and yet will never achieve if they do not understand who they are as people. We are talking about an end to greed disguised as business, and end to federal rulings as the be all and end all of life and conscience, the death of “big” government and “big”labor and “big” business. We are talking about subsidiarity, locality, love of God, love of neighbor, love of land, love of home, love of life, and love of country.

We are talking about distributism.

Video Promo!

We have a new video promo! It's a little fun, a little cheesy, a little simple, and just about right.

Sometimes It Just Happens

The title pretty much says it all. My favorite is Bill Clinton alternating between falling asleep and nodding intelligently. The guy who put this together really should tack Rick Perry's "oops" moment on the end. Enjoy!

Moving Forward...Towards Something!

Conservatives confuse me.

I don't say that in a thoughtless or sarcastic sort of way. They genuinely confuse me sometimes. I hear plenty of talk coming from the conservative radio/blogosphere side of the political argument about Obama, how horrible he is, how bad the economy is, how it's all his fault, how government is over-regulating business, and how we are losing our freedoms one by one.

And they always end with the same argument: that liberals are keeping the country from “moving forward.” In fact, one of the slogans of the Fox Business Network is, you guessed it, “Moving Forward.” The president and his administration need to get out of the way of the American people, in order to allow them to “move forward.”

I have one question: what IS forward? Which way is forward, and where will it take us to? I would assume that when one moves forward, one is moving towards something, a goal of some sort. In the end, in my opinion, “moving forward” may sound nice, but it barely means anything at all on closer inspection. And it seems no prominent conservative cares to explain what it means. 

A Few Words Concerning Executive Decision Making...



Jason Lewis - Picture by Genesis Communications Network.
License Info here.



I was intrigued and ultimately floored when I read the news about Al-Awlaki and the circumstances of his killing by a U.S. unmanned drone strike. There was a distaste I had for the operation that I vaguely understood but needed complete clarity on, so naturally I went in search of wiser minds to help explain. This article here is a piece written by political author and talk show host Jason Lewis, one of the most balanced minds in the talk show business and the calmest articulator of the limited government argument I have heard so far.

Another Brilliant Analysis by Ms. Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is a proverbial breath of fresh air when it comes to discussions of politics and policies. Her insight into the problems facing our country and the divisions caused by both government and the private sector is penetrating and complex. She realizes that there is no simple "the other side is evil and uncooperative" fix-all argument for the situation at hand.

I will let her say it in her own words in an article she wrote for the Wall Street Journal.