Robin Hood was a Republican

My left-leaning friends never tire of conjuring the ghost of Robin Hood when they talk about using the government to take from the greedy rich to give to the starving poor. This in spite of the fact that the greatest health problem among American poor people is obesity. The analogy comparing tax and spend liberals to Robin Hood, fails on several levels.

Let's take the case point by point:

1. Robin Hood stole largely from wealthy politicians - clerics, barons, earls and kings - the worst sort blue-blooded riff raff.
2. Robin did not exactly steal from the working rich to give to the poor either. He took back money extracted from citizens by the King's tax collectors and gave it back to the poor from which it had been taken - rather like taking it from the IRS and giving a big tax rebate to the country's over-taxed citizens.
3. Robin did not get a cushy job out of the deal with a retirement plan, a weekly paycheck and health insurance. He had no power from the crown to harass ordinary citizens with unnecessary paperwork, license restrictions and the threat of jail. He was chased into the forest, constantly hounded by the sheriff's men and generally under-appreciated by the leftist celebrities among the privileged classes. 
4. Robin gave the money he took back to the sick, the lame and downtrodden and to the hard-working farmers and tradesmen who had earned that money in the first place, not in order to get the support of the professionally indigent in exchange for their support for maintaining the self-appointed and self-serving nobility in public office.
5. Robin Hood believed in the right to keep and bear arms. Robin and his men were armed citizens. He knew how to shoot accurately and it is highly unlikely he'd have turned in his bow and arrow just because the King said so.
6. Robin Hood believed the king drew his rights and privileges from ordinary citizens, not the citizens from the generosity of an entitled nobility (i.e. the government).
7. Robin Hood was a strong believer in liberty. So much so that he was willing to fight for it against an oppressive government.
8. Robin Hood believed in a strong national defense, joining King Richard on his crusades against Muslim invaders (check your history - the Muslims got as far as Austria before the European nations banded together to drive them back to the Middle-East).
9. Robin Hood believed in the right of the ordinary citizen to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. He believed small business people, farmers and tradesmen had a right to ply their trade unmolested. He was a free market capitalist.
10. Robin Hood believed in freedom of religion and that the church should be independent of the state, not a tool of oppression for the state. He robbed wealthy and corrupt priests and bishops, but kept his own chaplain for his band of merry men. 
11. Sir Robin of Loxley believed in free speech. He spoke out fearlessly against the depredations of the Lords and nobles who oppressed the poor working man.
12. Robin Hood believed in the freedom of assembly. He was always conducting impromptu meetings and doing community organization work, much to the dismay of the landed gentry and the nobles and priests.
13. Robin Hood believed in a free press. He often posted competing notices next the ones the king and the sheriff nailed to trees all over the countryside.
14. Robin Hood didn't tell people how they should eat, drink or enjoy life. He had no appreciable desire to tell anyone how they should conduct their personal business. He liked girls even though he wore tights and believed in the importance of keeping traditional families together even when times got tough. He didn't whine when the going got tough. He solved the problem the best way he could with the resources he had at hand.
15. Finally, Robin Hood believed that a corrupt powerful government should be held accountable for its sins. He engaged in civil disobedience against unjust laws and periodically recalled a particularly corrupt and despotic politician to a special tribunal that will take place, not in this world, but in the next one.

 Ergo, Robin Hood is, if not precisely a Republican, then a at least a self-identified Tea Party conservative of the first rank.

© 2014 by Tom King

Is Melting Pot a Misnomer?

What 69 years of the socialist melting pot looks like.

The Coca-Cola Superbowl commercial this year cranked up a lot of conservatives who claim that it is divisive and some sort of evil liberal plot to promote communism through soft drink commercials.

I didn't get that from it at all. I saw it as an affirmation of America as the melting pot. Remember, the song returned to English at the end as all those languages once again became melded into one. The English language and especially American English is the sum of many languages.

Don't believe me?  Sit down to supper.  Are you having jambalaya, barbecue, burritos or pizza?  Maybe you'll schlep down to the deli for a bagel. You could sit out on the patio and play your banjo, eat a banana or dip some tortilla chips in guacamole made with fresh avocado. Maybe eat a frankfurter or polish sausage. English borrows its vocabulary from the best of every other language there is. I think what we should see from this commercial is not that people come to this country speaking other languages, but that they all contribute to the beauty that is the American language.

Coke's behind-the-scenes video points out that, though we come from many countries with many different languages, we become one country out of all that. Rather than seeing our differences in that brief bit of film, why is it that we are not seeing the things that make us one.

It's little wonder we are called racists so often. There are racists among us as conservatives, though by no means are all racists conservatives. The liberal racism, anti-semitism and cultural paternalism is no lest pernicious.  It is time that Christians and conservatives seize the narrative and interpretation of things like this Coke commercial.  While it may be true that liberals try to make a point and use things like this to damn conservatism as a racist philosophy, it does not follow that these things are inherently racist in and of themselves.

Diversity is not a bad thing. If we as conservatives embraced diversity and made it an essential part of our own narrative, we would defang those leftists who treat people from diverse backgrounds as "groups".  As a conservative, I embrace our differences and believe we should lift up people of all backgrounds. We should point out what we have gained from every single culture we have absorbed into the American stew. I think melting pot isn't a particularly good metaphor.  A melting part makes a homogeneous liquid of everything put into it - everything the same everywhere.  That's a Communist idea.

The reason I put a picture of Moscow at the top of the page is to show what happens when Marxist socialism makes everything "fair" for all people. It created a melting pot that turned the very city of Moscow, once a colorful vibrant city into a bland, smoky gray and dull misery. We do not want that. Free market capitalism doesn't do that. America has never done that before except in places like Detroit where the socialist, central-planning experiment has been conducted with vigor. The consequences are obvious to anyone who looks hard at the historical evidence.

Freedom of opportunity, freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the right to self-defense have allowed us to become a vast stew (note I did NOT say melting pot). We have chunks of this and that and flavors that mingle throughout the broth. We are a banana split, not a milkshake. We are a five course meal, not a smoothie. The conservative ideal that raises the right of the individual human being to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over everything else can be seen in that Coke commercial.

Let us not let the liberality of the framers of the Constitution be relabeled again. What was liberal in 1776 is now the ideals of those labeled "conservative".  We have seen a shift over 200 years of the opposition as well.  Those who supported government by the elite, central planning and rule by the powerful were once conservatives and sided with the British during the revolution. These same elitist; the same people who once defended the divine rights of kings have simply redefined the nobility as the hereditary smart people. They have appropriated Darwin's "survival of the fittest" to justify the rule of the nation's elite families that for generation after generation attended Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton and went on to become senators, congressmen and presidents.

They have toyed with idea of eugenics to weed out the lower classes, then with Marxism as a tool to pacify the ignorant masses so they would not revolt again as they did in 1776 and endanger the preeminence of the new nobility that the liberal chattering class have fancied themselves to be. They've used Planned Parenthood as a tool to reduce the number of black people and poor people in America through the promotion of abortion generating a death toll of unborn children of more than 57 million. They've used a welfare system that's rigged to discourage the poor from rising above their station where they might make trouble.

They've pounded the middle class with taxation and regulation because the middle class make a disproportionate amount of trouble for our would-be overlords. The don't want to ever see the middle class elect another Reagan as president - someone who threatens change that would derail the steady march of socialism and give hope to the American people again. So they substitute the hope of bread and circuses today for the hope of a better future tomorrow. For the restoration of traditional American values, they substitute change that undermines our lively free-market capitalist economy and turns it into a dismal, over-regulated gradual and seemingly inevitable slide toward socialism.

These are not toy boats. These are full-sized fishing boats.
The Soviet government managed to dry up an entire sea.
That's what a centrally-planned economy will do for you.
Amazingly, we do not seem to be able to learn from this.

Sometimes our fans are our worst enemies where American bedrock conservatism is concerned. The racists, the conspiracy theorists, the paranoid and the ignorant cling to our flanks and weigh us down. We should not fear to shake them off by speaking truth to them. We need only one rule to give us the power to take back our society. It is a golden one and if we practiced that one rule above all others, we would be irresistible. We could take back our country; put it back on the right track.

Sadly, I think it may take the Second Coming to accomplish that. I am not discouraged by this. On the contrary, the more people who come to understand and embrace, freedom, diversity, opportunity and honor, the more fun heaven and the New Earth will be.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King © 2014

Conservative Compassion and the New Tone

(c) 2011 by Tom King


Philosopher John Locke - Noted Liberal
and champion of individual rights.

 
There are those who would say those two words are an oxymoron. Conservatives get constantly painted by the left-wing media as tub-thumping, gun-toting Neanderthals who are, let me see if I remember this correctly - racist, homophobic, bigoted, ignorant, knuckle-dragging, cold-hearted, selfish and narrow-minded drones.

I'm sure I didn't get them all.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware what epithets some of the knuckle draggers on my side of the political aisle have tossed out about the left. They aren't any better than their liberal adversaries and deserve a slap-down from their fellow conservatives. They get it too - pretty regularly. If we're going to argue with our liberal friends we need not - indeed must not - use the same techniques they do. Most conservatives would find it repugnant to dip into the Saul Alinsky/Karl Marx playbook to make their argument anyway.  It would feel slimy and besides it's not in our nature. Lying for a good cause doesn't sit well with those for whom telling the truth is one of the commandments.

The problem is the label conservative. A conservative today is not what he was 200 years ago. Those who are now tagged conservatives embrace a philosophy that was once considered liberal in this country. John Locke, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the like were considered the great liberal minds of their day.  The conservatives wanted to preserve the nobility and the monarchy. They opposed the revolution because it dethroned the elite and took away what they considered their birthright - the right to rule the ignorant masses.

In the 1800s the once powerful conservatives searched for a way to transmorgrify themselves in America into something that preserved the right of the privileged class to rule.  They found it in a movement that on its surface was meant to "free the masses" - progressive socialism. The tenant of this new movement was that the ignorant masses needed the guidance of smart people - people that the new Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest said would pass along their superior intelligence to their offspring. So with the aid of poorly understood science, some political sleight of hand and a conserted effort to redefine the meaning of "liberal", the nation's high and mighty put on the mantle of the founding fathers for a while - for as long as they needed it to consolidate their power which was the whole point of the thing anyway.

Meanwhile the constitutional liberals who believed in liberty, freedom, self-reliance and treating others the way you want to be treated found themselves becoming what conservatives have always been - people opposed to radical change.  In America, however, we had already built a foundation on liberal principles and instead of like European conservatives who fought to maintain the power of the noble elite and to convince the "masses" willingly to submit to their governance, America conservatives, instead,  fought to maintain the power of the people, to break the power of the high and mighty who would create an American nobility if they could and convince the "ignorant masses" that they should come along quietly like good little workers.

Conservatives today believe what liberals of the 1700s believed. We believe that all men are created equal, that they have the right to life, liberty and the free pursuit of happiness. We believe that no man or woman has the right to lord over us, to arbitrarily take our rights to self-govern and hem us about with regulation, interferance and bureaucracy.  We give to the poor and needy far more than our so-called liberal opponents who consistently give a tiny percentage of income compared to their conservative neighbors. We believe your faith is your business so long as you leave us to worship as we see fit.

There are racist homophobic bigots among us on both sides of the political aisle, just as there are profoundly unChristian people who sit in a pew every Sunday, prayerbook firmly in hand. Today's conservative principles do not preclude a person being loving, charitable, compassionate and good. They are, in fact, the same principles that guided the framers of the Constitution, which in turn framed the real change that took place in our country and led to emancipation, women's suffrage and a level of general prosperity unknown in history. Our poor are fat, our sick are cared for better than anywhere else and our nation, though we fight fiercely among ourselves in the arena of ideas, we have renounced empire building and settled into our current role as the world's peacekeeper.  We have defeated enemies and built them back up again, better than they were before - Germany, Italy, Iraq. We have shed American blood to try and save others from invaders - Kuwait, Korea and Vietnam. We have done wrong and regretted it and tried to make amends. We carry guilt for our mistakes - for Native Americans and slavery in particular.

But it has always been stubbornly clinging to the great liberating ideas of the Constitution and Declaration that has transformed us into the bastion of liberty we are today. We who believe you shouldn't mess with a good thing are painted as selfish and bigoted by our opponents, when every principle we hold dear argues against selfishness and bigotry.  There are those who would toss aside our founding principles in the name of change, offering the illusion of "security" in exchange for a bit less liberty.

Given the history of rule by the special people, we conservatives, though disposed by nature to be compassionate, can, perhaps be forgiven for believing that's not a good idea and getting a bit riled up about the whole thing. 

Just sayin'

Tom King