In Defense of Scott Simon and - AMERICA II
In Defense of Scott Simon and - AMERICA II
By
Ken Eliasberg
In responding to the very harsh and unsupported (and unsupportable) criticisms of America (and the concomitant defense of the indefensibly wicked and, yes EVIL conduct of your garden variety terrorist) by our sheltered academics, a few introductory observations are in order.
In establishing grounds for criticism wouldn’t the place to start be to provide some standard, some method of evaluating conduct, some basis of comparison? That is, before we play the game, should we not first establish the ground rules by which the game is to be played? Not to overplay the use of the old Henny Youngman gag — i.e. how’s your wife, with the response being, compared to who? — but isn’t that how one goes about conducting any sort of situational evaluation, i.e. what standard are we using to determine what’s good, what’s bad, what’s acceptable, what’s not, etc., etc.?? Apparently this is not the standard used by our left-wing Academics; they just start out with the conclusion that America is wrong (actually not just wrong, but bad), and reason backwards from there, grasping for allegedly supportive facts as they go along. In short, any judgment made with respect to almost any inquiry into human behavior should be given context and not just the somewhat abstract and whimsical opinion of any individual or group of individuals, no matter what form of credential the opinion-maker carries (and it would also help if that credential carried with it some form of practical, rather than exclusively academic, experience).
First, let me acknowledge that America is not a perfect country; it is just the best that the imperfect human condition can produce. And this is the most glaring error in the argument that our left-wing academics muster up in attacking their country — you know, the country that provides them with a handsome living, thereby affording them a comfortable position from which they can express their unhappiness with their country (as well as securing their vantage point via the advantage of tenure, a benefit that affords them the opportunity to make any sort of absurd accusation, without any fear that such might place their job in jeopardy — a luxury that is not afforded to the rest of us who have to work for a living). What is that glaring error? The one that the left in its entirety is guilty of — a failure to understand human nature. Humans, by their very nature, are flawed and imperfect. Moreover, they are not, try as you may, perfectible — more perfect, yes, but perfect, No!! Our Founding Fathers understood this, and thus created an elaborate — but fundamentally simple and comprehensible — system of checks and balances. This was to protect us against the weaknesses present in our own nature. To be more specific, the framework they put in place was to protect us against the improper assertion of power by the very government that they had created. This is the clearest illustration of the brilliance of these people; they recognized (as most religions do) that man is a flawed creature, and that, given the opportunity to collect too much powerin one centralized body, was apt to abuse that power to the detriment of its citizenry. Therefore, they sought to limit the possibility of such abuse. As noted, they were brilliant; it is a pity that the brilliance so clearly manifest in our initial body of representatives is so conspicuously absent in our current governing bodies (a fact compounded by the conspicuous absence of common sense in most members of the social studies departments in today’s Academy).
That said, it is obvious that whatever the structure that our Constitutional framers put in place, it could not alter, let alone eliminate, the fundamentals of human nature, one of the most fundamental of which is our capacity to err — you know, the idea that to err is human (to forgive divine).Now I am not now conceding error in our foreign policy (I’ll address that later), but, for purposes of this discussion, all that is necessary is to acknowledge that no matter what the plan of human endeavor it must take into consideration the possibility — indeed, the likelihood — that errors will occur; mistakes will be made. That’s why airplanes have automatic pilots, to provide for course corrections in just such an event (and the “event” is constantly occurring). And mistakes — even fatal ones — are necessary. It is the only way we learn, and, as I have advised my sons, the only people who have not made mistakes are the people who have done nothing. As I once advised my company’s board at a director’s meeting, you learn much more from your mistakes than you do from your successes. The goal in both cases — my sons and my board’s directors — I counseled was to avoid making the same mistake twice (although even here it is sometimes unavoidable). The point here is to acknowledge the inevitability of error in any sort of human endeavor (while not conceding at this point that any specific action in our foreign policy was erroneous).
One final observation to bolster this assertion — not that it should need any bolstering — but I am reminded of the importantce that Thomas Edison — among others — attached to the trial-and-error method of arriving at a final solution or an end product — he found it indispensable — and how could it be otherwise; success in any endeavor is never (or certainly never in my experience) a straight line up - it is almost always a step or two forward and, all too frequently, a step or two back in order to make a compensatory adjustment. And this is how life proceeds, in the foreign policy area or any other area. Indeed, as we shall see as we continue with this discussion, contrary to the left-wing’s protestations of our bellicosity and/or imperialism, we have paid a much higher price for being inappropriately peaceful or conciliatory than we have paid for appropriately asserting ourselves. I don’t mean to make this preachy, and I know that it is merely a comment on human nature and common sense, but, unfortunately, these are the 2 qualities that rarely, if at all, enter into left-wing thinking, particularly that emanating from the social studies departments of most of our colleges and universities. I urge the reader to look at this column as an effort at stage-setting, a preliminary exercise before examining in somewhat greater detail the reasoning and reasonableness of the anti-American nonsense that issues from our academy (and make no mistake about it, it is America-hating in its most destructive form). To be continued.