The View From 1776

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Wall Street Journal editor and columnist Daniel Henninger blasts New York City bureaucrats for the years of bumbling that resulted in an unnecessary fire and the death of two firemen.  As the Journal website is a subscription-only one, I have reproduced Mr. Henninger’s column below.

The fire location was the Deutsche Bank building, which flanks the World Trade Towers site.

The Deutsche Bank building mess is a continuation of the obstructionism that characterizes New York State and New York City, two of the most socialistic administrations in the nation.

As I noted last March in World Trade Towers: a Socialist Fiasco, “We can count on government planners to produce the most inefficient projects conceivable by the human mind.? Manhattan?s Freedom Tower, intended to rise on the site of 9/11 destruction, is an egregious example.”

The original World Trade Towers project itself was initially a classic big-government bungle:

“... in its privately planned and financed development, Citibank announced its intentions and completed its new headquarters on Park Avenue within three years.? 399 Park Avenue opened for business in 1961.? An additional nine years would pass before the socialistically-planned UDC was able to complete the first WTC tower in 1970.”

WONDER LAND
By DANIEL HENNINGER

We Have Met the Enemy, Again
?August 23, 2007;?Page?A10

Even in these times, an August dimmed with miners trapped in Utah and China, Mexico’s hurricane and the final body pulled from below the Minnesota bridge, the story of two New York firemen dying in a dead building was just too much.

Since September 11, when so many died across the street from the Deutsche Bank building in lower Manhattan, a great deal of effort has been made to ensure that no more people die in the U.S. from anything remotely connected to that day. Nearly six years after, we in New York have become used on any given morning to finding additional police on subway platforms (as yesterday) or seeing fleets of police cars in front of large commercial buildings. The purpose is to show presence, and deter terror.

So when it emerged that all the sirens one was hearing last Saturday afternoon in Manhattan were because the empty building known as 130 Liberty Street had caught fire, and that two firemen had died on the 14th floor when their bottled air ran out, one was dumbstruck. Then angry.

This building stands just outside The Journal’s downtown office. Many of us walk past it and Ground Zero twice a day. If you looked to one side, you were staring into vast slabs of concrete and construction in the famous pit. Look to the other side and you saw the dead, utterly useless DB building hung, seemingly forever, in black mesh. After awhile what you did on this little stretch of street is never look to the sides, just straight ahead. Because if you looked at the DB building, you’d have to think what it meant that after six years, this grim thing was still up.

Now that two men have died trying to put out a crummy fire, maybe the time has arrived to squarely face just what the appalling six-year presence of the Deutsche Bank building represents.

It’s about New York surely, but the inability to get this building down stands as a broader rebuke to a country that has become so comfortable with indulging its countless legal, personal, political and administrative obsessions that it cannot protect its own people by doing the obvious.

You surely recall what the 9/11 Commission said about the problems that led to that day, and before that the Bremer commission’s report on terrorism predicting that the U.S. was at risk for precisely the same reasons—an American system engulfed in proceduralism and legalism. And loving it. That’s right, loving it. Our public officials and the attendant factions and community groups are so far gone into their never-never lands of crossing “t’s” and dotting “i’s” that they barely know how to bring an issue to resolution. In their world, it’s never over. Process is life.

The road map to Saturday’s tragedy may be found on the Web site of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the page titled “The Deutsche Bank Building at 130 Liberty Street.” In a chronological listing of “public documents” from September 2004 to November 2005 are 19 dates inside of which are uncountable numbers of fact sheets on air monitoring, “supplemental investigations” of fireproofing, vertical shaft sampling, cell system sampling and requests for variance to the horizon. There is an Advisory Committee of four LMDC members, four politicians, 16 “community representatives” and nine federal, state and city agencies. They met a lot.

At the center of this 40-story-high tangle of fishing line one finds the hook on which the whole mess has been hanging for six years—“contaminants of potential concern” or COPCs. The most politically paralyzing COPC of all, needless to say, is asbestos.

Lest a fiber of asbestos float from the building and spread cancer panic across lower Manhattan’s streets, the one-floor-at-a-time demolition required an “abatement and removal” plan whose mind-boggling technical and physical details would fill half the first section of this newspaper (“All interior non-structural building materials will be removed under negative pressure . . .”).

Basically, men in space suits were scrubbing virtually every interior surface by hand and dismantling it by hand. Who could doubt that the human error rate would rise over time under such conditions, such as the steel beam that fell and penetrated the roof of the firehouse nearby? Or indeed this fire. Abandoned buildings full of the same materials are demolished faster all the time, but not this one. Instead of a demolition plan that struck a balance between controlling the toxicity and getting the job done, the process created what is virtually a hermetically sealed environment—to demolish 40 floors of junk. They’ve made the building so “safe” you can’t get it down. So after six years a fire erupted and two firemen caught in the “Matrix”-world of 130 Liberty St. died.

The details of this public-policy morass are no exception in the post-9/11 world. They are the norm. The hyper-complex requirements and mindset reflected in the public record over 130 Liberty St. mirror the endless debate and litigation we’ve also layered into efforts to surveil and prosecute terrorists.

Yes, partisanship plays its part, but intellectual hubris and self-regard plays a larger part. We’ve got a society that’s smarter than ever, but maybe too smart for its own good. Whether the problem before us is national security, the environment or protecting baby, we compulsively drive the system now to develop the most exquisite, complex procedures, which allow us to think ourselves both perfectly safe and ethically perfect.

Procedural perfectionism has been raised to religious status. Normal people now think like lawyers, bureaucrats and administrators, rather than as in the techworld, where the culture values fast mid-course corrections and can-do.

One may ask: The political and commercial forces that produced stasis for 130 Liberty St. may outwardly mourn the deaths. But would any of them pull back from their obsessions now to get the building down fast? I doubt it.

We have met the enemy, and he is still us.
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Rachel Alexander describes state initiatives to clarify the affirmative-action muddle created by ambiguous and contradictory Supreme Court rulings.  Read Taking the Civil Rights Initiative on the Intellectual Conservative website.

No matter how you slice it, affirmative action is unequal, and therefore unconstitutional, treatment under the law.  Moreover, it directly contravenes the explicit language of Congress’s 1960s civil rights legislation.

Liberals argue that diversity, a concept unknown in the Constitution or historical tradition of the United States, is a higher value than the principle of equal protection of all citizens under the law, embodied in the Fifteenth Amendment.

Liberals also use the condescending argument that affirmative action was necessary to create a black middle class.  This contention is belied by the rapid ascendance of a black middle class in metropolitan locales such as Harlem in the 1920s, even in the face of blatant racial discrimination. 

If large numbers of blacks since the 1960s have been unable to repeat their grandparents’ achievement, with far less racial discrimination, that is the fault of the mindset of welfare dependency fostered by liberal administrations.

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Learning nothing from the bitter disappointment of Soviet brutality, American liberals are once again entranced by the chimera of world peace and harmony that they identify with socialism. 

18th century French Revolutionary philosophers created the theatrical stage for the peace illusion.  They taught that private property, which implies some people being richer than others, is the root of all social evil.  Theoretically there will no longer be conflict, crime, or wars when everyone has equal access to all of the world’s goods and services.

The peace illusion is further colored by the 19th century doctrine of Darwinian evolution.  Peace movement votaries believe that United States actions in World War II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East have prevented the advent of world peace, because those actions worked against the evolution of “peaceful” collectivist force.

Johan Galtung, the originator of today’s international peace movement, demands that the United States cease thwarting evolutionary survival of the “fittest” military and political powers, those who can conquer and subjugate the United States

In The Peace Racket on the City Journal website, Bruce Bawer writes:

If the U.S. and the U.K. oppose a dangerous development, in [Galtung’s] view, we?re causing trouble?Milosevic, Saddam, and Osama are just the way the wind is blowing. Galtung?s kind of thinking leads inexorably to the conclusion that one should never challenge any tyrant. Fittingly, he urged Hungarians not to resist the Soviet Army in 1956…

Mr. Bawer continues:

We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it?s opposed to every value that the West stands for?liberty, free markets, individualism?and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we?re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States. Sponsored by Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 cosponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to ?establish a Peace Academy,? ?develop a peace education curriculum? for elementary and secondary schools, and provide ?grants for peace studies departments? at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence.

Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C., would be a fair punishment for America?s arrogant view of itself as ?a model for everyone else,? he?s long held up certain countries as worthy of emulation?among them Stalin?s USSR, whose economy, he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West?s. He?s also a fan of Castro?s Cuba, which he praised in 1972 for ?break[ing] free of imperialism?s iron grip.? ....His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution.

Professor Galtung’s views bring to mind another Norwegian, Vidkun Quisling, the collaborationist head of Norway’s government during the Nazi occupation in 1940-45.  Quisling’s name became a synonym for treason.  Galtung’s bids for synonymity with lunacy.

In the United States, the peace movement is preparing young students to become virulent haters of our nation.

The people running today?s peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement?s illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue?s program is coeditor of Marxism Today, a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis?s peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion…

...In short, it?s America that is the wellspring of the world?s problems. In the peace studies world, America?s role as the beacon of opportunity for generations of immigrants is mocked, its defense of freedom in World War II and the cold war is reinterpreted to its discredit, and every major postwar atrocity (the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan) is ignored, minimized, or?as with 9/11?blamed on the U.S. itself.

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Maggie’s Farm links to Jules Crittendon’s Forward Movement website, where Mr. Crittendon outlines the horrendous aftermath of our pullout from Vietnam, which the Times characterizes as “few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.?

To paraphrase George Santayana, those who don’t know the past are condemned to relive it.  The Times, emotionally conditioned by its adulation of all things socialist, emulates the Soviet technique of erasing all traces of people or past events that contradict the party line. 

Times’s editors probably will be genuinely astonished at the nasty consequences of the Iraq pullout urged by liberal Republicans and Democrats.  They are, first and foremost, focused upon destroying George W. Bush and winning the 2008 election, at any cost.  In addition, theirs is a fairy tale world in which foreign policy problems cease to exist if we just act in a friendly manner toward our enemies, engaging them in diplomatic discussions under the auspices of the UN.

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Unlike earlier immigrations, today’s flood of immigrants, who have limited education and limited acquaintance with the English language, appears to be driving native born, low-income blacks and Hispanics out of the cities.

Read Steven Malanga’s article in City Journal.

In Do Immigrants Still Nourish Cities? he writes:

“Proponents of our current immigration system often argue that we should preserve or even expand it because immigrants are essential to our cities? health. Foreign-born workers, this argument goes, replace American-born city-dwellers who would rather live in the suburbs, and use their talent and energy to help urban neighborhoods and industries revive and thrive…

“A study by immigration?s leading economist, Harvard?s George Borjas, calculates that immigration has reduced the wages of blacks and lowered the black employment rate in America. Blacks themselves see the link between their employment struggles and immigration. A Pew Research Center poll found that 58 percent of blacks in Chicago believe that illegal immigrants take jobs and housing from U.S. citizens.

“The media in most big cities simply ignore such studies.”

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Peaceful Reflections
By Jim Baxter

Every September, I recall that it is more than half a century (62 years)?since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year,? I ?have? watched and ?listened? to the light-hearted? ?“peaceniks” and ? their??light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that “Peace is not a cause - it is an effect.”
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In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.
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B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.
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We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions,? perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.
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In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.? The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.
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Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant…” Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice-making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound. ?America!
Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature’s pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!
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As? a ?newly? assigned? member ?of? a ?U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many ?major ?cities ?of ?Japan,? including ?Tokyo? and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would ?have ?assaulted? had? the? A-bombs? not? been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for all,?but?especially for? the people of? Japan.
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When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I’m sure, my own.
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Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, “conventional” warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.
The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous “rights” purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.
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At best, these fakers manifest a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.
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In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth’s latest model world- tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.?
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The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth’s choicemaker, it is our human identity on nature’s beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man’s free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.
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Free men should not fear or envy the oppressor nor choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, “Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?”
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Semper Fidelis
Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC?
WW II and Korean War?

Job 5:23? Proverbs 3:31? I Samuel 17:40

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From 1605 until the late 1960s, Americans universally subscribed to Benjamin Franklin’s maxim,“A penny saved is a penny earned.”  Since the Baby Boomer student anarchism of the late 1960s and 1970s, we have become a nation, on balance, worshiping infantile, instant, hedonistic gratification. 

Liberals? ideas about ?values? have to do with the absence of personal restraints and with material goods and services, which is what the welfare state is all about.? Values for the colonists were the elements of spiritual morality, the intangible qualities that differentiated humans from other animals.?

The values of 1776 preached individual self-restraint, self-reliance, and hard work for the future of one?s family.? Liberal values give us what has been called a juvenocracy, a society dominated by the heedless pursuit of instant gratification that is characteristic of inexperienced youth: devil take the hindmost; eat, drink, and be merry.

The current generation are less to blame than their Baby Boomer teachers who fancied themselves so smart that they didn’t need education.  Their mission was to take control of universities, eradicate the classical curriculum that transmitted the values of Western civilization, and to replace it with “relevant” subjects, i.e., the ideology of socialism’s revolutionary social justice.

That brand of social justice preaches that everyone is entitled, indeed has a Constitutional right, to an equal share of society’s goods and services, without having first to work and save to acquire the objects of his desires.

Yes, unsophisticated home buyers failed to understand what would happen to mortgage payments when interest rates rose.  But more fundamentally, they failed to grasp that jobs can be lost, and anticipated salary increases might not come to pass; that elementary prudence demands having the wherewithal to pay before your buy, as well as having a cash reserve to carry you over emergency periods.  Schooled by Baby Boomer “respected educators,” they believed that it is their right to indulge to any extent and rely upon the Federal government to bail them out.

What I wrote in A Divided Nation Without God applies to our economic juvenocracy.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1885), speaking of the ethos prevailing in Western Europe (what we witness today in the United States as a cultural war between Judeo-Christian traditionalists and liberal-progressive, atheistic materialists), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

Anarchists in 1885 were savagely antagonistic to this [original laissez-faire] liberal faith in ?progress?

...they are one in their faith in the morality of commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself, as though it were the summit, the attained summit of mankind, the only hope for the future, the consolation of the living, the great deliverance from all the guilt of yore ? they are all one in their faith in fellowship as that which will deliver them, their faith in the herd, in other words, in ?themselves?...

Nietzsche could easily have been describing today?s ?educated? young people coming out of our colleges and universities, having been thoroughly inculcated with the anti-American, atheistic, and philosophically materialistic religious views of the Vietnam War Baby-Boomers who infest academia?s professoriats.

As many other observers have noted, our short-changed young graduates have been led to believe that universal indulgence in narcotics, sexual promiscuity, and rebellion against the nation?s founding traditions constitutes individuality: Nietzsche?s herd-mentality.? Conformity to the latest media-communicated fad in dress, entertainment, and social justice ideas is ?individuality.? The media bombard us with images of youth, turning society into an immature juvenocracy that worships only that which is novel and consciously rejects the wisdom of experience in past ages.

Nietzsche?s ?commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself? is the doctrine enunciated by our first socialist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ? truth is whatever wins out in the public market, whatever viewpoint the media can create in the minds of the majority of citizens.?

Conspicuously absent is any sense of personal responsibility.

Blaming mortgage brokers for the subprime collapse?is like blaming alcoholism on the distillers.

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GOP YouTube Debate Back On, But Will It Be Worthwhile?
By Jeff Lukens

Well it looks like Republicans will be participating in a CNN/YouTube debate after all. The event is now set for Nov. 28 in St. Petersburg, Fla. The campaigns of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and others have signed on for the event. Mitt Romney has still not said whether he will participate. The GOP postponed their YouTube debate for September fearing a silly spectacle such as that recently held by Democrats.

While the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate may have given presidential debates a new twist, it was mainly a publicity stunt. The broadcast had moments of emotionalism and frivolity more worthy of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” than a presidential debate. Its gimmicky format almost became a clown show.

Instead of a discussion about Second Amendment Rights, we had a guy holding “his baby” - an assault rifle. In place of a legitimate question about Iraq, we got an emotional father of a fallen soldier insisting we withdraw so that he might not lose another son. And rather than a thoughtful inquiry about “gay rights,” we had two homosexuals asking why they cannot marry. Romney observed, “I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman.”

Romney has a point. Has the public become so in need of amusement that we can no longer are willing to sit through an objective presentation of each candidate’s views? Maybe so. Eventually, Republicans must come to terms with the new medium.

Many GOP bloggers and activists are urging their candidates to participate in this new debate forum. Their concern is that if they do not participate in a CNN/YouTube debate, they would reinforce the notion that the Democrats dominate the internet and that Republicans are behind the times.

Republicans, including Romney, should participate a CNN/YouTube debate, but only if it promises not to present the same sense of frivolity as it had for Democrats. If CNN and YouTube want the Republicans, they should agree to select only inquiries with the decorum and substance worthy of a presidential debate. Moreover, CNN cannot act as if it is an agent for the electorate when it offers up mostly left-leaning questions.

It is no secret that television distorts reality and can shorten people’s attention span. Now these traits are spilling over into the political realm by an electronic media that emphasizes the inconsequential, the bizarre, and the irrelevant at the cost of informative discussion on the issues. To our detriment, political showmanship takes priority over substance.

Yet, most of the GOP presidential candidates are backing away from their objections to participating in the YouTube debate. The debate promises to bring much attention from the sought-after 18-to-35-year-old voter block. It would be such a shame if Republicans missed this opportunity. Activists believe that if they don’t attend millions of Americans will wonder why they were so afraid to take questions from the internet.

While the normal response of everyone is to help a person in need, when someone confronts a candidate on video with his or her particular hardship, is the candidate supposed to promise a national policy to aid that one individual? What’s good for that individual may not be good national policy.

A complex issue that took a candidate months to research and thirty minutes to deliver in a speech, and is summarized into a thirty-second segment on the evening news. Television is here to stay, and candidates seeking national office must learn how to present themselves on it positively to have any chance of being elected.

Debates should highlight the leadership abilities of each candidate. But if the candidate can deliver a memorable one-liner, he or she will usually prevail over an opponent who would dare try to explain the factual basis behind a piece of legislation. Because everything on television survives not by substance but by ratings, electoral campaigns are becoming ever more dumbed-down as they strive to be noticed by the media.

In a search for alternatives, Newt Gingrich has proposed nine Lincoln-Douglas style “dialogues,” ninety-minute in length, for the nine weeks before the 2008 general election. While this idea runs counter to a trendy CNN/YouTube debate, it has merit.

As television changes the standards by which we measure a candidate’s suitability for office, the line between news and entertainment is blurring more each day. YouTube accentuates this dynamic toward the trivial. We should remember, however, that a good television performer is not necessarily a strong leader.

And speaking of Lincoln, our greatest president would never make it today on YouTube. Sadly, television would bar him as someone who has no star appeal. Not only may we be losing a true national leader in these debates, we may also be choosing a candidate whose main talent is just that he or she does well on television.

Jeff Lukens is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at http://www.jefflukens.com

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