WHERE BUCKLEY the IIIrd meets HOWARD STERN...This is about the 1.7 billionth English-language blog about society and religion. But I guarantee you something -- it will go viral. Not because I'm special...now I know so many Xers and especially millennials think that of themselves (the only justification for them having something like two or more blogs each, on top of facebook and twitter), but I know my own flaws and limitations. I don't hide them, either.
People will notice them sooner or later, so why the hell even try?
Let's begin with telling you about my blog: Well, first of all, it's premise for existence: Western civilization -- led by America -- is fast headed down the tubes. No, Obama and Biden professing devotion for gay marriage is not a cause, it's a late after effect of what began probably starting around the time of the great baby-boom, mid-20th century. The victory over Western and Eastern fascism greatly inflated the collective ego of this society, exponentially over the decades through and including the fall of euro-communism.
Then it was home free for the West, or so we thought.
China, the haven of Eastern communism, is due to economically surpass the United States in terms of total output in four years (if Laura Ingraham is to be believed).
Radical Islam is making gargantuan gains stationing openly throughout Europe, east and west. Guess where it's headed next?
The marriage rates and connubial birthrates are dropping like a fart across the board.
America locks up more drug offenders and petty-level criminals than any other Western society with tougher-looking police personnel, yet suffers under more relative substance abuse and violent crime than almost any other advanced country in the West.
Obama has been a train wreck, yes, though the G.O.P. is already pining for yet another, bigger, more spectacular, more costly, and more detrimental war in the middle east: this time, an Iran takeover.
Sounds great, doesn't it? Oh yeah, and pop music sucks today like never, ever before.
The Great Modern Debate is cast within the narrative of progressive-secularists -- who presumably operate with elite, institutional backup -- versus the broadly Reaganite, traditional moral value, free market contingent. Somewhere straddling the sidelines are those libertarians, who frankly often promote libertinism. Unless, of course, you're Ron Paul.
Nevertheless, both of the broad, competing sides are deeply misunderstood, and deeply deficient --with their own sets of problems.
For one, people in America who practice conventional Judeo-Christianity -- particularly white Roman Catholics -- tend toward the more affluent and educationally elite strata. Yet we hear ceaselessly about "cultural and liberal elitism" eroding our simple, core values. And people with those core values being portrayed as toothless simpletons.
We hear about the decline of marriage, mostly from the cultural right. Yet, most divorce happens in bonafide red states, among conservatives. Yes, they have higher marriage rates, thus higher divorce rates. But overall, marriages with children stateside are more likely to break up than cohabiting arrangements between men and women in ultra-progressive Sweden. I mean, wow.
Both sides profess sacred devotion to the First Amendment. Yet, both sides cherry-pick at its attendant rights -- particularly free speech. That's right: you'll routinely hear more or less orthodox Christians in America moan about certain speech being "offensive," (I'm not even talking salacious or pornographic) even from others like them but with different manners of expression -- all the while castigating liberals for trying to curb religiously-based expression (or viewpoints) from being expressed in the public square. Believe it.
Hypocrisy breeds hypocrisy, my friends, which then breeds contempt.
ABOUT ME: I am a 33 year old, Caucasian man living in a suburb of Providence, RI. That's right, once the northeast's urban renaissance, now literally on the cusp of municipal bankruptcy. Once goes Rogue's City, so then goes the whole state.
In early childhood, I was speech-delayed. A local, higher-end public school system placed me in special education (with a rigorous speech therapy regimen) and wanted to keep me there past my point of age-appropriate progress. My parents objected (half my class being retarded), and threatened legal action.
Representing my cause was then-Sister Arlene Violet, R.S.M. Sister Violet was a practicing attorney (and still is), until she developed political ambitions and clashed with the Vatican over them. She exited the order, and would be elected as state attorney general with a Republican affiliation.
Representing my cause to speak, if you will, may end up as Arlene Violet's biggest professional regret, as my life 28 years later will soon prove.
My parents started off as lower middle-class, and would steadily rise with the 80s and 90s boom-waves into the entry-level upper-middle class. Neither completed college.
I graduated from the state's last all-male preparatory academy, Bishop Hendricken High School. I went on to graduate from Rhode Island College, one of two four-year state schools, after a two-year stint at Salve Regina University, operated by Ms. Violet's former Sisters of Mercy community.
Hence, I went into journalism, writing at various and overlapping times for each a local weekly, twice weekly, and daily between Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts.
In spring 2005, not long after the pope's election, I was awarded a Robert D. Novak journalism fellowship by the Phillips Foundation, a non-profit group in Washington, D.C, whose namesake owns Regnery Publishing. The purpose of this more-or-less year-long stint was to begin a book-length, publishable manuscript on a non-fiction sociopolitical topic.
Mine was (and remains) the men's rights movements and masculism (more on this later), and I successfully completed my official fellowship in late 2006.
Though a strong, unwritten expectation of the Phillips Foundation is to remain affiliated as sort of a club beyond the non-renewable fellowship period itself, I nonetheless disaffiliated from the organization in 2007. As even more casual observers will note of its web site, it is profoundly ideological, strongly aligned to mainstream G.O.P. causes. In 2007, this very, very much meant it was almost wedded to the Weekly Standard pro-interventionist editorial stances, strongly supporting Bush-Rove foreign policy, by means of many fellows themselves and the broader Eagle Publishing group, including Human Events and Regnery books.
While I am grateful for the early career jumpstart they gave me, such an association became too cumbersome. That, and I had a significant personnel-related difference with them, and also felt censored quite a few times within the program. But life goes on.
Starting not long before then, one might say, I've encountered waves of stiff opposition, both from institutions and even within my private circle. No doubt, over my form of expression. Some have even used coercive and/or emasculating rhetoric and means to degrade and quash my expression and present freelance-based occupation into "real" 9-5 work "with a schedule and a boss," etc.
And what some of them are now beginning to wake up to.
You see, life comes and goes in distinct cycles: I am now at a similar point I was at this time in 1984, when Arlene Violet came into my life briefly.
However, I now act out her role as my own personal advocate and somewhat a religious militant. And while I am more philosophically orthodox, I share in her much-touted disgust for so much of the institutional Roman Catholic Church in America.
For a practicing Catholic-Christian in this part of the world, this day in age, I'm nonetheless sort of a bad-ass. For men in particular, these Western Christian religious groups here place a primacy (wrongly so) on personal passivity and lack of anger as virtue. I am anything but, and I'm not so certain that a culturally-divorced, objective reading of Gospel scripture quite affirms the 11th Commandment of passivity.
And yes, I am least likely to get along with the priggish, effeminate nancy mama's boy, so self-righteously perched in great quantities in so many of today's pews, and for that matter, church leadership positions. By no means, though, are all active men of faith of such ilk.
Still, I assent to the Church's timeless beliefs, well summed-up for the most part recently by Canadian media personality Michael Coren's Why Catholics Are Right. But that doesn't mean I have to like most of today's American bishops and approve of all day-to-day methods of operation.
While the Church is emphatic over its sexual teachings, the fact remains that in today's technically celibate Latin Rite of Roman Catholicism, at least triple as many priests have homosexual tendencies as does the general male population (something like 30 percent are non-heterosexual). While not even close to a majority of clergy, that still rises somewhere around the levels of ordained male Anglican clergy, as a common ritualistic stiffness and liturgical vestment fashion performances often permeates. Today's bishops seem more accepting than not of this (in spite of predictable implications), perhaps in part because the newer priests are BOTH more likely to be gay, and more likely to be conservative. And just how many newer priest are coming down the pipeline, compared to even thirty years ago?
PHILOSOPHIES: Besides Catholicism, I take a deep interest in the relations between the sexes in America today. In short, it's a disaster.
It's simple for one of more traditional leanings to point straight at feminism, or women's liberation, as the cause. But would that have even been if society wasn't a disaster preceding it? I mean, that's like saying in order to oppose Soviet Stalinism, go back to the decades before the Revolution in 1917. Come on.
This will surely be a main focus of this forum, along with my pithy observations (collected over a decade and a half) of the life and way of existence between men and women. But then there's the hurdle of political correctness to cross:
If Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism, then America is probably more like the Kuwait, Syria or Malaysia. In all, political correctness in the U.S. can be categorized and prioritized as follows:
1) RACE:
By far, hands down, the most verboten of criticisms or slurs that are tolerated in open society today: this applies primarily to the formerly enslaved Black races, less to but still much to Hispanics, and increasingly to Muslims.
Anti-Semitism, overall, seems to be of a different category, as it is found alive and well on both sides of the socio-political border.
If you're caught using a racial slur, your career is pretty much forever over.
2) HOMOSEXUALITY:
A very high priority protected group. Using anti-gay slurs is beheading-worthy to much of society today. Even criticizing state-sponsored gay rights is verboten in the public square, and will be increasingly so in years to come. c.f., the Commonwealth of Canada.
3) WOMEN AND FEMINISM:
Believe it or not, this is a somewhat distant third, though Amerika is still quite rigid in its view that even white, suburban caucasian women are vaguely patriarchal victims, or conversely, sexual revolution victims: Both Dems and often GOP-ers straddle these two poles.
But as Geraldine Ferraro put it, "it's not OK to be racist, but it is OK to be sexist." Now I'm NOT OK with any sexism, but I strongly believe it cuts both ways along the gender spectrum, from both distinct political angles. Don Imus was fired in 2007 far more over the racial dimension of his ladies' Rutgers U. basketball team comment, than the sexual dimension, though quite deplorable.
Otherwise, Bill Mahar would be receiving food stamps from the Swedish government by now.
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So what's wrong with Rogue's Island these days? Well, here's a little microcosm to look at:
You want socialism in practice? Never mind Brown or even the University of Rhode Island, where no doubt those philosophies abound (as do a large number of private job recruiters). Go instead to Rhode Island College (RIC), my alma mater in Providence. It's as if two-thirds or more of students there are there for the purpose of earmarking their entitled local, municipal or state, union-supported employment: in public schools, as social workers, as law enforcement, even as attorneys. It's the "all in the family" mentality writ large. So what's wrong with Rogue's Island these days? Well, here's a little microcosm to look at:
Problem is, those municipal jobs are fast disappearing. And so will RIC if it doesn't radically re-tool, and fast.
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My name is Jeff Jackson, and get set for an adventure like no other. I'm late to the blogosphere by about 8 years, but that still would have been a time far premature.
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