Keep It Pithy Page 4

  FIVE

  FROM 9/11 TO BENGHAZI

  What Have We Learned About the War on Terror? Anything?

  Our U.N. ambassador, Obama buddy Susan Rice, recently crowed that the United States has “decimated” al Qaeda worldwide. (Misusing the original meaning of the word—look it up!—she evidently meant something like “destroyed”.)

  Really, Madam Rice?

  It seems that many in government still are unable to read the handwriting on the wall. Like a virus, terrorist beliefs, goals, and actions have spread from the Middle East into other parts of the world. Attacks here at home—so far foiled—are no longer infrequent.

  Have we learned anything at all?

  The secular-progressive movement opposes coerced interrogation—not torture, but harsh treatment—of captured terror suspects. They object to detention of them at U.S. military prisons like Guantánamo Bay. In addition, the ACLU opposes military tribunals (rather than civilian trials) to determine the guilt or innocence of suspected terrorists, floating wiretaps (already in use in U.S. criminal investigations), telephone surveillance of overseas calls by U.S. spy agencies, airport profiling, the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and random bag searches on subway or mass-transit systems.

  In short, the ACLU opposes making life more difficult for terrorists but proposes absolutely nothing to make Americans safer. Osama has got to love it.

  And for too many years, he did.

  But the debate about the usefulness of harsh interrogation techniques rages on. Have you seen Zero Dark Thirty? Brilliant drama, but it is not going to change the minds of those on either side of the argument.

  A very peculiar response to the terrorism on 9/11 crossed into the field of religious controversy.

  If you haven’t heard about a certain required reading list at the University of North Carolina that erred in the interest of “diversity,” you’re going to be shocked, puzzled, or both.

  I was distressed to hear that in the fall of 2002, the administration at UNC was going to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled Approaching the Koran: The Early Revelations. The book is a sanitized version of Koranic philosophy, concentrating on lyrical stories and poetic lore. It’s a very interesting book, but there’s no way it should be mandatory reading in any public school.

  Just imagine the outcry if any school demanded that students read Bible Highlights or Nice Stuff from the Torah. I mean, the ACLU would be setting itself on fire in protest—figuratively speaking, of course. But the ACLU was strangely mute when UNC issued its reading list.

  So what was really going on here? Well, the backlash from 9/11 was hurting many law-abiding Islamic Americans, and the philosophy of “diversity” was taking some hits. So the University of North Carolina decided to set a proactive example and require students to read a book that is favorable to Islam. The intent was good, but it was a direct violation of the separation concept because it required students to learn about the positive aspects of a specific religion while ignoring the negative aspects. That’s religious advocacy, not intellectual discipline. And that’s not allowed in a publicly funded university in the USA.

  The force behind the Islamic reading selection was UNC professor Dr. Robert Kirkpatrick. On July 10, 2002, he entered the No Spin Zone on The O’Reilly Factor. I’ve condensed some of our debate, but the main points are these:

  O’REILLY: The problem here is that this is indoctrination of religion.

  KIRKPATRICK: No, it has nothing to do with that. It’s a text that studies the poetic structure of the Koran and seeks to explain why it has such an effect on two billion people in the world.

  O’REILLY: UNC never gave incoming freshmen a book on the Bible to read.

  KIRKPATRICK: We assume that most people coming to the University of North Carolina are already familiar with both the Old and New Testaments.

  O’REILLY: But if you did do that, there’d be an outcry all over the country.

  The professor had no answer for that. Soon after, under pressure from the North Carolina legislature, UNC dropped the book from its required reading list. Approaching the Koran became an optional reading assignment, as it should have been all along. I’ll go one step further: If the book was mandatory reading in a theology or history class, I would have had no problem with it. But forcing all incoming freshmen to read any book praising a specific religion does violate the mandate that public universities have to live by in order to receive tax dollars.

  There’s an interesting side note to the controversy. As I said, the ACLU was MIA during the UNC brouhaha (I love all those initials). Also, most other media did not cover the story as aggressively as we did. As part of our analysis, we rejected the idea that reading the Koran book would help us get to know the world that the 9/11 killers inhabited. Number one, I don’t think the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad have anything to do with homicide and terrorism. And second, I reject the argument that you have to digest a book of poetry and religious interpretation in order to “know” your enemy.

  I said this to Professor Kirkpatrick: “[As a UNC freshman] I wouldn’t read the book. And if I were going to the university in 1941, I wouldn’t have read Mein Kampf either.”

  Kirkpatrick asked why. “Because it’s tripe,” I answered.

  The next day a number of Muslim websites wrote that I compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, the usual vile propaganda some of these sites spew out. What can you do?

  Here’s the key question: How can terrorism exist if rational human beings know that murdering innocent women and children is the most cowardly act on earth? The answer is complicated, but, in the end, it comes down to untreatable mental illness. Osama bin Laden and his crew are not discernibly different from Hitler, Mao, or Stalin. Shrinks define them as sociopaths, but that is a clinical term for the hospital or classroom. In the everyday world, these men are simply evil and must be isolated or killed so that innocent people can be protected from their treachery.

  But, Lord, there are so many of these barbarians. There are millions of human beings who have killed or will kill people because they believe some god or the führer or whoever has ordered that. If you still resist the idea of active evil in the world today, just picture the nineteen 9/11 hijackers killing three thousand people for absolutely no reason. Time after time, history has shown us that this kind of murderous conduct is part of the human condition. But still, some on this earth refuse to believe that evil exists and that terrorism is the epitome of it. Getting people to understand that truth is central to the struggle of our times.

  Bottom line: Terrorist killers and those who support them are evil. Period.

  State of Yourself

  “ ’Tis himself!”

  —Traditional greeting when a flamboyant

  individual enters an Irish pub

  SIX

  WHAT’S MINE?

  Americans Just Want More Stuff, and That’s a Problem

  And I’m looking in the mirror here.…

  Here’s something that really surprises me: The more stuff I have, the more stuff I want. And so I looked around and saw that everyone else was the same way. It was not until I had a few things that I noticed how this works. The material stuff is addicting!

  Remembering my parents, I try to fight against the “stuff addiction.” I refuse to buy jewelry or trinkets. I don’t need expensive toys like Jet Skis or snowblowers. I keep the material things under control, and I banish thoughts of them from my brain. Besides, I am very busy. My life doesn’t include window-shopping or paging through mail-order catalogs by the pool or jaunts to compact disc stores or Home Depot. These are all invitations to spend money unnecessarily.…

  Greed is the destroyer of success. You cannot be creatively successful and greedy at the same time. I’m talking about both material and emotional greed here.

  Sorry, Wall Streeters. No apologies to you guys.

  (photo credit 6.1)

  Note to Hillary Clinton. Why keep coming up with more government programs to give our tax money away, when you could teach us all how to make a fortune on our own? You invested $5,000 with Robert “Red” Bone, a commodities trader later under investigation for allegedly manipulating the market, and got back profits of $73,000 a few days later. Tell us your secret, Hil, and we might vote you senator for life!

  Change that offer to “president”?

  The most ridiculous part of our American system is this: Different rules apply to the rich guys.

  It’s not supposed to be that way, right? Our country was designed to be “for the people.” The people, not the rich people.

  In short, this country has developed a ridiculous blind spot: the power and glorification of money.

  This is truly an affliction. It is holding us back as a nation, as a community. The true heroes of America are not the new Internet billionaires or the overpaid sports stars and movie actors or the wise guys who jack up their companies’ stocks. The true heroes of America are the men, women, and teenagers who go to work for a modest wage, fulfill their responsibilities to their families and friends, and are kind and generous to others—because that’s the right way to live.… The working people of the United States are the most important ingredient in the enduring American story.

  But the rich and powerful have forgotten or never learned that bedrock truth. Or they simply don’t care.

  But forget them.

  Each of us is, to a large degree, in control of our own lives.

  That includes me; that includes you.

  Why is there so much drug and alcohol abuse in America today?

  Simple: Alcohol and drugs make huge profits for legal and illegal organizations.

  Simple again: Much of the population is bullish on intoxication … [“I want mine”]. And set in their ways. Dedicated pot smokers believe they are “mellow” and look down on crackheads nodding out in alleyways or deserted basements. Young professionals sniffing coke know that they’re on top of the world, masters of the universe: The drug tells them so. The country club set, knocking back martinis and Manhattans and Cosmopolitans, looks down on the rednecks at the noisy beer joint across the county line, and the writers and intellectuals at the local college sneer at both groups for being “alkies” but believe that a trip on the latest psychedelic drug is an intellectual adventure. But everyone has one belief in common: I can handle my “drug of choice.”

  Here’s the takeaway: If you are after success in America, substance abuse can be your downfall.

  Some of the drugs may have changed since I wrote the above, but the moral is the same. Self-indulgence, and especially harmful, debilitating self-indulgence, is not going to give you what you want. It will keep you from getting what you want.

  But it’s not that simple. Do you know anyone who is “just saying no”? I hope you do, but I have several reasons to doubt it.

  Try these (the stats have changed since 2001, when I printed this list, but the story line is much the same):

  1. There are in excess of 10 million “heavy drug users” in the United States.

  2. Approximately 70 percent of street crime is drug related.

  3. Approximately 70 percent of all child abuse is committed by substance abusers (this includes those who abuse alcohol).

  4. There are more than 1 million DUI arrests annually in the United States.

  And now, voters in several states, as we saw in the 2012 elections, think that it’s “bitchin’ ” (if you recall that word from California in the late sixties) to legalize marijuana.

  There are three basic strategies needed to control America’s drug problem. First, impose coerced drug rehab on all criminals who are arrested and test positive for narcotics. Second, use the U.S. military to assist the Border Patrol from Brownsville, Texas, to Imperial Beach, California, and use the Navy to assist the Coast Guard. And third, sentence major and persistent drug sellers to banishment in faraway federal penitentiaries.… Back in the 1960s my father told me that anyone who dealt dope was a parasite, a person beneath contempt. I always remembered that. How many children are being told that today, especially in the ghetto neighborhoods? What do kids think when they encounter the sleazy dealer?

  SEVEN

  THE KIDS

  Hollywood Sleaze, Wrongheaded Educators, Nutty Judges, and Other Problems Knocking on the Door

  The assault on traditional values is especially insidious when various elements of society, from entertainment to the schools, from advertisers to judges, ambush our kids at school, on the playground, or over broadcast media and the Internet.

  Where to begin?

  How about 2006?

  For the secular-progressive movement to achieve its goals in America, it must undermine traditional parental authority and convince children there’s a brave new world out there that does not include being raised in the traditional way. The S-P goal is to diminish parental authority, which, in the past, had been unquestioned.

  This is a strategy—mentally separate children from their parents—that has been practiced by totalitarian governments all throughout history. In Nazi Germany, there was the Hitler Youth. Chairman Mao created the Children’s Corps in Red China. Stalin and Castro rewarded children who spied on their parents. That’s the blueprint.

  If you want to change a country’s culture and traditions, children must first abandon them and embrace a new vision. Hello, secular-progressivism in the USA. I’m not saying these people are little Adolfs; I am saying they have adopted some totalitarian tactics in their strategies.

  I want you to recall how the courts can weigh in on the S-P agenda.

  Kids seven to ten years old in Palmdale, California, were required by the school district to take a very disturbing sex survey. Sample question: “How often do you think about sex?” That’s not a misprint, folks. You can read the whole story in my book Culture Warrior, pages 124–27.

  But here’s the pith:

  The parents sued the district in federal court. [The case went up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most liberal federal court in U.S. history.] … Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote the unanimous opinion, which stated that parents of public school children have no fundamental right to be the exclusive provider of sexual information to their children. Reinhardt was direct: “Parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on that subject to their students in any forum or manner they select.… No such specific [parental] right can be found in the deep roots of the nation’s history and tradition or implied in the concept of ordered liberty.”

  That noise you hear coming from underground?

  It’s the sound of the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.

  Remember “Captain” Lou Albano, the wrestler? He always said, “This stuff is fake. Don’t try it at home.”

  So listen to me, someone whom you know from TV, when I say, “Be careful what you let your kids watch, and what they start to believe, if they fall for everything they see on TV.”

  It started back in the fifties.…

  (photo credit 7.1)

  The parents gave up part of their job to TV, TV brought in pretty pictures of perfect family life, and the kids glued to this mental bubble gum began having unreasonable expectations of their own human, unscripted parents. Most parents want to do what’s best for their kids, though it’s not always easy to know what that is. With TV images and ad temptations millions of American parents came under siege. TV, according to one writer, “fed a sense of generational superiority” in the kids who watched it. I know exactly what he means, and so do you.… Satisfying the desires of children can be an overwhelming task. Worse, it can distract parents from paying attention to the really important parental duties: teaching discipline, morality, and the truth about how the world works.

  Or, in the same vein:

  Seven in ten [high school students] admit to cheating on tests, and 92 percent say they lie. And most of those kids don’t feel much guilt at all.… What caused this deplorable state of affairs? Number one, “cowardly parenting.” Number two, “corrupt national leadership.” As the tree is bent, so will it grow. And today kids can look all around at so many bent adults that they can hardly guess what it means to be straight. People basking in the spotlight—and I don’t mean just politicians—are forever presenting terrible examples to the children of America.

  And if we so-called adults can be tricked senseless by the clever shills of Madison Avenue, pity our poor children. The ads are designed to make them think that they are the most deprived creatures alive because they don’t own expensive designer clothing or high-tech toys and games.…

  Money doesn’t buy love or happiness. We have to help our children understand that the proof of affection is not an overpriced gift. Otherwise, we are helping the advertisers set them up for a frustrating life of trying to cope with their problems by racking up credit card bills at the mall.

  (photo credit 7.2)

  The late Steve Allen talked about the dangers of TV to children on my program some years ago.

  I think it’s a conversation worth remembering:

  O’REILLY: Do you think that watching these programs will make kids want to have sex?

  ALLEN: No. Mother Nature makes them want to have sex. The argument is that when sexual material is dealt with on television and nobody has to worry about birth control or sexual disease, then the implication is, “Hey, it’s all kind of cute and hip and let’s do it even though I’ve never met you before.”