Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

MLK statue in DC

MLK sculpture in Boston 

Today honors the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And Daniel Greenfield observes the occasion by weighing in on the newly unveiled bronze sculpture on Boston Common:

The Sculptural Degradation of Martin Luther King Must End
When leftists aren't tearing down noble statues,
they're putting up ugly ones

Forget tearing down the statues of American historical figures, if they really wanted to humiliate them, they would put up new statues of them.

Just ask MLK.

The D.C. MLK memorial was bad enough. Not only does it look more like Mao than MLK, and maybe carving the most prominent black man in the country out of white rock was an odd choice, but the $10 million Boston MLK memorial decided that it could do better.

Titled “The Embrace,” it’s a nightmarish image that looks like a collaboration between M.C. Escher and H.R.Giger. There’s nothing ennobling or dignified about this artistic statement about the sculptor’s love of curves and circles. It goes beyond being meaningless to being actively ugly and offensive, a tangle of arms that embrace themselves. When leftists aren’t tearing down noble statues, they’re putting up incredibly ugly ones. . . .

Mr Greenfield closes:

Putting up something like the $10M MLK memorial in Boston is its own act of artistic vandalism and, in its own way, shows the degeneracy of a culture that tears down statues but can’t manage to create one.

The full commentary is at Front Page Magazine here.

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Prager: Explaining Conservativism II

 

Dennis Prager continues his deep dive into what it means to be a conservative.  Here are his concluding paragraphs from the Jewish World Review:

Explaining Conservativism II: Why the Left Hates It

. . . The conservative wants to pass on to every generation the best that human beings have created. Depriving young people of the greatest art, literature, music and ideas is a form of child abuse. The result has been generations of ignorant and foolish people, many of whom are actively working toward the opposite of what the "progressive" label suggests: taking society backward.

I would wager a serious sum of money that most American college students could not spell "Beethoven," let alone recognize any of his music; has never heard of Dostoevsky; and would not recognize a single sculpture or painting by Michelangelo. Instead, they learn about "preferred pronouns."

For these reasons, the end of conservativism must lead to the end of Western civilization. When you don't conserve the ideas and art, the religious moral values, and even the nuclear family that made Western civilization the most advanced civilization — materially, morally, scientifically and artistically — ever devised, you will no longer have that civilization. You will have morally confused, emotionally broken, lonely and angry young people — who will eventually wreak havoc on all that is good and worthy of surviving.

We conservatives want to conserve the beautiful, the profound and the wise.

What does the Left wish to conserve? The answer is: nothing. That's why everything the Left touches it destroys. The less you conserve, the more you destroy.

Read his full column here.

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A Glimmer of Hope

 

Patriot Post meme via PowerLine

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse is always a step ahead of everyone else. Here’s a chunk from his weekend column:

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics was downstream from pop culture.  Andrew’s ability to engage any audience that generally didn’t care about politics, while displaying the Machiavellian manipulators in a way that was brutally effective, made him an enemy to those who avoid sunlight.

What we are seeing amid college football games, and recently any venue where a large audience is assembling, is really quite remarkable.  The cultural shift within the modern political sphere was triggered by Donald Trump; his election was the biggest middle finger to the elites, and ultimately the scale of his support amid a global population that was disenfranchised is why they needed to eliminate him.

The leftist Marxist’s have power.  However, their unquenchable lust for power, specifically showcased in their COVID-19 reaction, has put them in a place where they are in power but losing the cultural argument.

Free people can only tolerate and internalize so much frustration before it starts to come out. Specifically, because frustration is now palpable anger, the sense that screams freedom has become snarky, raw, unapologetic and now often vulgar.

Yeah, it’s a weird thing to find alignment with vulgarity, but when your life and liberty is on the line… well, you fight like the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s ark – and you appreciate anyone that stands beside you.

If  “F**k Joe Biden” bothers you, don’t watch this [video] . . .

I didn’t watch the video, but I am certainly following the phenomenon.  Full article with video is here.

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When cultures collapse

 

image credit: saturdayeveningpost.com

Walter E. Williams sums it up:

A society's first line of defense is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly imparted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Today's true tragedy is that most people think what we see today has always been so. As such, today's Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.

Williams considers gun violence, popular music, unwed mothers, manners, and more. His article “Things Haven’t Always Been This Way” is at Townhall here. RELATED: Peter Skurkiss at American Thinker is unhappy about the degradation of public school dress codes in Texas. Not encouraging.

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Multiculturalism: not good

Photo credit: onlyinus.wordpress.com

American children

Many of my relatives and friends take pride in their enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism. I oppose it because it discourages assimilation, and it celebrates cultural differences rather than common values. As far as Cleveland Tea Party is concerned, one of the core values, that of limited government, is subverted by uncontrolled immigration that expands the nanny state and dilutes our cultural fabric. The melting pot is giving way to the societal mosaic, more apt to shatter.

A Canadian contributor to PJ Media, David Solway, eloquently summarizes “The Scourge of Multiculturalism” (h/t Instapundit):

The argument made by immigration and refugee enthusiasts, namely that the Western democracies were founded and settled by immigrants and therefore should continue to welcome newcomers, is valid only to a point. In the course of time the original settlers created a national identity, a sense of communal membership in a common world unified by custom and law. It is that identity that should be preserved. . . .

I am not opposed to immigration per se, only to ill-advised and special interest agendas that would weaken and adulterate the stable domestic accords arrived at over many generations.

To say “we are a nation of immigrants,” then, is immaterial. We are now a nation of citizens. Skilled immigrants, properly screened and taking into account real domestic needs, should be part of the country’s future, but not in multiples that threaten to dilute a nation’s internal cohesion, not from backward countries whose inhabitants are all too often uneducated, illiterate and functionally unassimilable, and certainly not from parts of the world -- in particular, the Islamic world -- whose history, culture, theology and politics have ranged it against everything that Western civilization comprises. The plight of European nations like Germany, Sweden, England and France, sinking into a morass of civil unrest, criminal violence and legal subversion, should be an incontrovertible object lesson that multiculturalism is the devil’s gift to a forgetful and undeserving people.

The congeries of welfare recipients bankrupting our fiscal resources, inner-city ghettoes of disaffected and belligerent residents, the array of lawfare plaintiffs, the proliferation of de facto censorship procedures . . . and the consequent erosion of community standards are the poisoned fruit of such unstructured immigration protocols -- a scourge prettified under the term “multiculturalism.” 

. . .

There is no shame in cherishing and defending one’s “old country” patrimony and the values upon which civic and communal life are founded. This has nothing to do with an antecedent “Eurocentrism” that ostensibly degrades other peoples or with the risible canard of “white supremacy,” but with the sense of belonging to, for all its flaws and errors, the greatest civilization ever to appear on earth, a Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization that gave us, among innumerable gifts, the Bible and the Greek library, the magna carta, the concept of individual liberty, scientific and medical advances never before seen, and a technological, commercial and industrial infrastructure that has made life easier for untold millions.

Full essay is here.

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