Stephen L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel

February 5, 2012
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE: CURSES! FOILED AGAIN – Some comments on your 11th hour conversion [not really] to what those DWEMs [Dead White European Males] were talking about.

My dear Professor,

The power of the vampire comes from the fact that no one believes he exists.

Here it is, Super Bowl Sunday, and you made me feel like Charley Brown. You, like Lucy, told me not to worry. This time you’ll hold the ball. This time, honest to God, you’ll let me kick it.

From a mechanical engineering standpoint it is the plant leg, not the kicking leg, that is vital. I have my plant leg in the grasp of 25 centuries of the political science branch of Western Civilization. My kicking leg is arcing, gracefully but powerfully, towards the elongated spheroid – Do you think it would be sign of our maturity as a multi-cultural rainbow quilt society if we were to drop the term “pigskin”? – when you drop the ball yet again.

Boy oh boy but do I feel like a fool. Now I know why you never stand in front of a mirror.

Your column is about the perils of democracy.

The Greeks knew that the people, unfettered, would be an unruly mob. They would be in constant thralldom to the Sophist du jour. They knew that man will either control his passions or they will control him.

25 centuries since men began to argue about how to govern themselves it comes down, as it always has, to the conflict between order and freedom.

All, absolutely all, of the Western World’s political progress has been made when citizens control, restrict, impede, hamper, fill in the blank, the power of those who are in charge. The agora, the forum, the 5 Emperors, the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the miracle at Philadelphia, leap to mind. I would be remiss if I were not to include Thermopylae, Zama, Tours, Lepanto, Shiloh, and Midway inter alia. Free men, and men who would be free, are ferocious in a most feral manner when their rights, “rights that are theirs from beyond the stars”, are threatened.



The best evidence of this – man reigning in government rather than having other men afflicted with the Fatal Conceit of knowing what is best for all other men – comes from the first five words of the First Amendment.

CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW…

Then you broke my heart by not letting me kick the ball. I’m young. I’ll get over it.

You may be the proto-fascist that Plato had in mind when you said that the way to make men free is to make them less free. Ergo, the Internet, Twitter, Facebook – avenues of information that could be harmful to modern American Liberals, men infected with ”non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”, men such as yourself – must be controlled.

As you say, “[how} could we possible know?”

In the heart of every card carrying, fire breathing, if only they would just understand, true believing modern American Liberal is a storm trooper waiting to be unleashed. The Horst Wessel song has been replaced with Kumbaya. Be good or we’ll make you. Soon we’ll need a photo id to have a milk shake on the way to the voting booth where we won’t need one. The photo id; not the milk shake.

Once we have our thinking straight, once we hit the Reset button on the mystery of human nature, the lion and the lamb will cuddle peacefully. Of course, we will still need a new lamb every evening.

I’m sure there will be a government program to level that playing field.

“How stands the Republic, neighbor?”

For the first time the answer is unclear.




KEVIN SMITH
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET