Columnist.
As a talk show host, I have no choice but to keep up with what's happening in America and the world. I am therefore submerged in depressing and often angering fare. It is hard to read about and discuss the progressives who dominate American media and academia who morally equate Israel and Hamas; who describe America -- the most tolerant multi-ethnic country in the world -- as racist; and who characterize American universities as a "rape culture." But there was a barely reported story that came out of a small city in Vermont last week that, for reasons to be explained, really got to me. The story isn't comparable to the beheading of innocent people or as dramatic as the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri. But if it typifies what is happening in America, it is difficult not to be pessimistic about America's future.
My father, Max Prager, died last week. Here are some thoughts on the death of a parent.
Two weeks ago, the British medical journal, Lancet, considered to be one of the world's leading medical publications, published "An open letter for the people in Gaza." Signed by four European doctors on behalf of 20 others (17 from Italy and three from the United Kingdom), the letter had virtually nothing to do with medicine. Rather, it was a grotesque attack on Israel.
In order to justify killing Jews, Jew-haters throughout history made up libels about the Jews that were so awful that they justified, at least for the Jew-hater, the mass murder of Jews. The charge that the Jews of every age -- not just some Jews at one time -- killed God Himself was used by medieval Christians to justify mass murdering of Jews. Then came another grotesque libel -- what is known as the blood libel. Also prevalent in the Middle Ages, this charged Jews with kidnapping Christian children, sacrificing them and using their blood to bake matzo (the unleavened Passover bread).
When I was a graduate student at Columbia University's Russian Institute, there was a great debate: Was the communist Soviet Union an organic Russian development or was it largely a cancer imposed on it?
Let's drop the names "Hamas" and "Israel" and make a list of the characteristics of two imaginary warring entities. We'll call them Entity A and Entity B.
On page 563 of his latest biography, "John Quincy Adams: American Visionary," author Fred Kaplan (biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Gore Vidal among others) cites this insight of the sixth president: "Christianity had, all in all, he believed, been a civilizing force, 'checking and controlling the anti-social passions of man.'" That insight is pretty much all an American needs to know in order to understand why the American Founders considered religion -- specifically ethical monotheism rooted in the Hebrew Bible -- indispensable to the American experiment, and why the America we have known since 1776 is in jeopardy.
Given how much evil there is in the world; given how many signs of moral, intellectual and economic decline there are here in America; and given the increasing irrelevance of America to world events, it is fair to ask why the American Left is preoccupied with the name Washington "Redskins." The Washington Redskins have been in existence for 82 years. For about 80 of those years, virtually no one, including the vast majority of American Indians, was troubled by the name. Yet, it is now of such importance to the American left that the majority leader of the United States Senate has repeatedly demanded, from the floor of the United States Senate, that the team drop its name; 50 United States senators, all of them Democrats, have signed an open letter demanding the same; Sports Illustrated's Peter King no longer uses the name; other leading sportswriters have adopted the same practice; and the president of the United States has weighed in on the issue.
Last week, during the official celebration of the Los Angeles Kings winning the Stanley Cup, the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, told a jammed Staples Center that "there are two long-standing rules for politicians . ... They say never, ever be pictured with a drink in your hand and never swear. But this is a big f-----g day," he said, holding up a bottle of Bud Light. You read that right. In front of 18,000 people at Staples and hundreds of thousands of others watching on television -- many of them, of course, children -- the mayor of the second-largest city in America held up a beer bottle and used the F-word. This was not a whisper overheard by reporters. This was not an accidental loss of self-control. This was a planned use of obscene language in a public forum.
Pope Francis said something so important last week that it will either be widely ignored or widely disparaged. The pope criticized "these marriages, in which the spouses do not want children, in which the spouses want to remain without fertility. This culture of well-being ... convinced us: It's better not to have children! It's better! You can go explore the world, go on holiday, you can have a villa in the countryside; you can be carefree. It might be better -- more comfortable -- to have a dog, two cats, and the love goes to the two cats and the dog." He is right. More than ever before, young men and women in most affluent Western countries (and Russia) have decided not to have children. Instead, many shower love and attention on dogs and cats. Ask many young women -- married or single -- if they have any children, and if they do not, you are likely to be told, "I have two cats" or "I have two dogs." There are authors whose book jacket photo shows them with their dog or cat.
No day passes without a Democratic politician, a left-wing commentator, or, if I may be excused a redundancy, a left-wing academic labeling Republicans and conservatives racist. Given the power of repetition, one consequence is that many Americans, especially young ones, believe that one side of the political spectrum -- the right -- is racist. Having been involved with conservatives for about 30 years, I have long known that this isn't true. In fact, the charge of conservative racism is so easily refuted that it is difficult to imagine anyone without a vested interest in libeling conservatives believing it. How, for example, does one explain that the most conservative Republicans were the ones who most supported Herman Cain, the one black running for the Republican presidential nomination n 2012?
Last week, on my radio talk show, I received a call from Jeff, a 21-year-old in North Carolina. I have abridged it and edited it stylistically. JEFF: I wanted to respond to your question about America being feared in the world. You brought up Syria. I think it's a little naive, and maybe that's not even the right word, to boil down such complex international issues into just good and bad. Like to say that America, for you, represents good. And to just boil down the Syria situation into good and bad is to underestimate the complexity of the situation. Because if the United States were to get involved there, you know, there might be consequences for us in that region that I think would be definitely more bad than good.
Most conservatives, and just about all independents, have a huge misperception of the left. They think that the gulf between conservatism and leftism is primarily about means, not goals. This perception is wrong. It is their goals that are irreconcilable. And until conservatives, independents and the Republican Party understand this, it will not be possible to defeat the left. Take economic indicators. Most conservatives talk and act as if bad economic news disturbs the left as much as it disturbs them. It doesn't.
Last week, Oklahoma authorities botched the execution of a murderer named Clayton Lockett. The execution by lethal injection took more than 40 minutes. According to witnesses, he twitched and gasped and said, "oh, man" after officials had thought he was unconscious. Opponents of the death penalty outdid one another in expressing their outrage. It was the left's hysteria-of-the-week. In contrast, many Oklahomans were not nearly as upset.
A private recording of racist remarks by the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling, in a telephone conversation was released last week. Among other comments, Sterling said to his former mistress, a black Mexican woman known as V. Stiviano: "It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people. Do you have to? ... You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that ... and not to bring them to my games. I'm just saying, in your lousy f---ing Instagrams, you don't have to have yourself with, walking with black people. ... Don't put him [Magic] on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don't bring him to my games."
When Americans over the age of, let us say, 45, look at any of the iconic paintings of America's Founders -- the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the signing of the Constitution, George Washington crossing the Delaware, any of the individual portraits the Founders -- what do they see? They see great men founding a great country. If you ask recent graduates of almost any American university what they see when they look at these paintings, chances are that they see something entirely different.
In his column last week, Charles Krauthammer crossed a line. He declared the American left totalitarian. He is correct. Totalitarianism is written into the left's DNA. Krauthammer wrote about a left-wing petition "bearing more than 110,000 signatures delivered to the [Washington] Post demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming." He concluded: "I was gratified by the show of intolerance because it perfectly illustrated my argument that the left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation -- no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian."
In 31 years of broadcasting, and 40 years of writing, I have never advocated a boycott of a product. Quite the opposite, in fact. During the 2012 presidential campaign, when the left attempted to destroy Chick-Fil-A for its owner's views on same-sex marriage, I suggested on my radio show that the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, stand in front of a Chick-Fil-A restaurant while enjoying some Ben and Jerry's ice cream. In that way, I argued, he could show one of the great moral differences between the right and the left. Though Ben and Jerry are leftists, we conservatives do not believe that company owners' views should matter to consumers. We believe that products should speak for themselves. If the ice cream is good, despite whatever repugnance we might feel regarding the views of the makers of that ice cream, we will still purchase it.
As I have often noted, the most dynamic and influential religion of the past hundred years has not been Christianity, let alone Judaism, the two religions that created the Western world. Nor has it been Islam. It has been Leftism. Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate. For most of that time, various incarnations of Marxism have been the dominant expressions -- and motivators -- of Leftism: specifically, income redistribution, material equality and socialism. They are still powerful aspects of the left, but with the downfall of most communist regimes, other left-wing expressions have generated even more passion: first feminism and then environmentalism.
Last week, Pope Francis warned Italy's Mafia leaders that if they continue their evil ways, they will go to hell. Hooray for the pope. More power to him for threatening evil people with hell. I had begun to despair that in my lifetime I would hear such talk from mainstream Christian or Jewish leaders. For the past two generations, God has rarely been depicted as judging and punishing. Instead all we have heard is the phrase, "God Is Love," which, when offered as the one description of God, is morally meaningless -- and even morally dangerous.
