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Franklin and Washington, the two who rose above partisanship to save our nation

Congratulations to Dave Krieger, who is the new editor of the Boulder Camera editorial page. After losing a radio gig with KOA's Dave Logan, Dave decided to do some reading about America's founders. He writes about the two men, Franklin and Washington, who rose above partisanship to save our nation.

Washington’s ability to understand both sides of the partisan divide came largely from the war, the transformative experience of his life. He had been an aspiring aristocrat as a younger man, lobbying incessantly for a commission in the Royal British Army and for land grants to expand his wealth and holdings. It was the British refusal to give him the former and condescending method of adjudicating the latter that initially alienated him from the empire.

But during his eight years as commander in chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, he grew so attached and so loyal to his men, who came from every walk of life, that he developed egalitarian values uncommon among plantation owners at the time.

Franklin came by his political moderation a different way. As a 17-year-old runaway landing in Philadelphia long before anyone thought of revolution, he was an aspiring leather-aproned tradesman, a printer. Through his prolific writing, much of it satiric, he became America’s first champion of the middle class. He believed in hard work as the path to success and was suspicious of welfare programs for the poor, believing them an invitation to indolence.

On the other hand, he had a natural rebellious streak that made him skeptical of authority, particularly authority based on birthrights rather than virtues or talents. He viewed hereditary titles and wealth with disdain, believing the rich had no more right than the poor to unearned bounty. He was equally suspicious of the aristocracy and the great unwashed. He most admired the tradesmen and shopkeepers he saw as the backbone of the new world.

Washington and Franklin were diametrically different personalities, but they shared two key traits — pragmatism and a belief in behaving virtuously for its own sake. It was pragmatism that convinced Washington the federal government needed more power than Jefferson and the Republicans believed. As commander in chief, he was continually thwarted by a Congress powerless to raise money or do much of anything else. He watched his soldiers die by the hundreds for want of adequate clothing and supplies, then visited Philadelphia and found the privileged enjoying grand balls and feasts. Liberty from tyrannical authority was the point of the exercise, but if the colonies were to become a country, they would need a government that could raise and outfit an army for its defense, and that would require a federal authority to tax, among other things.

So, what conclusion has Dave done from reading about our nation's founders?

Political partisanship is nothing new. Politically partisan media are nothing new. The only thing we seem to lack today is the great leaders willing and able to bridge the gap.

Read more here.

Decadence: our passive, receptive, pleasure-seeking, self-indulgence

As Colorado again makes news, this time for free flowing marijuana, instead of school or theater shootings, I followed one of Gerard's links to this piece On Decadence by Charles Hill.

“Decline” we Americans and Westerners mope about daily; “fall” most of us still hope to postpone. Decadence, it would seem, is the mean between the two.

An explosion of dynamic individualism propels civilization forward toward a better future; but that same dynamic proves incapable of virtuous control, causing greed, violence and deepening self-indulgence to spiral society downward toward chaos.

The Puritans were consciousness personified, assiduous diary-keepers who were ever watchful for the slightest signs of grace or degeneracy.

George Washington's Farewell Address, commonly interpreted as a warning to avoid foreign entanglements, was more concerned with maintaining the character of the nation amid the temptations of freedom. As the world’s first-ever free people, the individual virtue vital to successful popular government could only be upheld, Washington believed, by respect for religion.

Social science is the new scholasticism, an intellectual paradigm in which participants are published, prized, tenured and made prominent for their contribution to one great required idea: to prove “scientifically” that human beings have nothing resembling what formerly was called “free will.” An avalanche of “studies” now unsurprisingly asserts that we hold prejudices seated in a level of our minds so deep as to be inaccessible to our conscious awareness.

The advent of “screen culture”—cellphones, iPads, as well as old-fashioned TV and film—now ubiquitous among the young in their formative years of education, has shrunk consciousness down in a different way. Students increasingly seem conditioned by the fact that much of their waking life is populated by mechanically mediated images in which they can see other beings on screens but those others cannot see them. As a result the viewer can become oblivious to others, having no need to interact or maintain a minimum of civil conduct with them. To think back on Herodotus again, this is the Gyges question: What do you do when no one is looking? The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it.The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it. This phenomenon adds a new dimension to the age-old definition of decadence.