Warning!  Politically Incorrect Language!

This was my family from 1967 through 1968.  Yes, Marine Corps tours were 13 months, while the other branches were 12.  This shows most of the platoon.  We were rarely apart.  Here we are at China Beach in DaNang, Vietnam for a one-day R & R with steaks and beer.

Each of us were together at one time or another on 5-day patrols, although the number of men on the patrol would range from five, seven or more depending on the complexity and danger of the patrol.  We’d go in for five days and then five days back to base.

On one 5-day jungle patrol during the Monsoon season we got socked in because of the weather.  After we ran out of c-rats we spent the next five days talking about our favorite foods.  McDonalds came in first for favorites.  Steve Rainey nigger-rigged a safety-pin and a line (oh we carried just about anything) so one would fish in the fast moving swollen brown river while another stood guard with his rifle even though we knew we were probably safe, for the enemy were living under the same conditions — hunkered down.  We got a call from the Commander of the 1st Marine Division to hang in there.  Steve Rainey did find a large lizard climbing up a tree.  He took out his KA-Bar fighting knife, cut off the head, cooked it and ate it.  None of us took him up on the offer to share in his meal.  After that we took to calling him “Rainy”.  On the tenth day, there was a break in the clouds and the chopper extracted us.  Back at base around 8PM the mess hall had been opened up with a big special meal for us of Steak and the whole meal deal.  We found to our surprise that we couldn’t eat much.  After five days without food our stomachs had shrunk.

Arnold Leal (later badly wounded), born in Mexico to an American mother and brought up in Texas, asked us to call him just “Spick”.  Jim DeMello (later badly wounded by 30. cal machine gun fire — shattered both femurs) was from Hawaii, a citizen of the US from the recently new state.  We called him “Hawaii”.  The “dark green Marine” — as we called Negro Marines — was a gentle quiet person who we did make fun of for his taking photos back at base of the clouds in the sky.  He wanted us to call him simply “Nigger”.  There was a Mormon who got special treatment to return to somewhere out of country for a yearly meeting.  Mike Rubenstein was Jewish.  We had a man from Alabama who was still a Confederate at heart so we called him either “Rebel” or “Stretch” (he was 6′ 6″ and weighed maybe 150 lbs.).  On Christmas day, 1967, on our first mission at Dong Din — a hilltop some 800 meters high, usually shrouded by low-lying clouds — “Rebel” received a present.  A small plane flew over and dropped a newspaper.  It was an Alabama paper.  Tiento — who does not appear in the photo — we called “Savage”.  He came from an Indian Reservation.  Tiento returned to the reservation and later died of — wouldn’t you know it? — alcoholism.  Soloman we called “Dope” because that’s what he was, a dope-smoking hippie wannabe.  I was called “Tracer”.  This has more than one meaning.  But being ambidextrous I had the strongest throwing arm.  Right-handed my grenade would travel farthest.  Close up left hand was most accurate.

Steve Thorne was a lumberjack from Washington state.  We called him “Thorn”.  Half way through his tour he couldn’t take another patrol, saw a psychiatrist, and we never saw him again.  McClosky was our platoon commander, a 1st Lt..  We called him “Sir” except on patrol when we whispered his name “Jim” so any enemy within hearing wouldn’t know.  The enemy would take out the commander first and the radio operator (me).  Boyle we called “Boil” after he was the second, after “Dope”, to come down with Malaria.

The rest of us were just Caucasians.  Guess we had every race and religion except an A-rab and a Slant-eye.

And I saw in my four years only one female Marine — BAM (Broad Ass Marine), but never in combat.  I did have a female friend in the military, Mary Therese Klinker, who was a year ahead of me in school and my sister’s best friend.  She was a Captain in the Air Force; a flight nurse — Killed in Vietnam in 1975.

All these were affectionate terms we all agreed to, either chosen by oneself or by our brother Marines.

“The centrality of the politics of slavery in shaping antebellum southern attitudes toward religion in government became even clearer during secession and the Civil War…When the South left the Union and no longer needed to defend slavery from northern attack, religion became extremely important in the attempt to create a Confederate nation.  The new Confederacy went further toward establishing the religious authority of the state than the old Republic ever had.

“The Confederacy sought to align the state with God and the church with the state as never before…In May 1861, the Southern Baptist Convention…invoke[d] ‘Divine direction and favor’ on the new government.  In a sermon preached the following month, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, a Presbyterian minister who believed the war was ‘between religion and atheism,’ went even further.  A nation was more than ‘a dead abstraction, signifying only the aggregation of individuals,’ Palmer proclaimed; it was ‘a sort of person before God’ and God called it, like other persons, to judgment.  Southerners therefore needed to confess their sins, the New Orleans minister continued, not individual sins…but national sins.  He then listed several, including the failure of the founders to make ‘a clear national recognition of God at the outset of the nation’s career.’  But, Palmer quickly added, he rejoiced that the Confederacy had receded ‘from this perilous atheism’ and formally, solemnly, and unequivocally acknowledged ‘Almighty God’ in its ‘fundamental law.’

“The idea of acknowledging God in the Confederate Constitution originated with Thomas R.R. Cobb, a Georgian, a devout Presbyterian…He convinced the committee drafting  a provisional document to begin its proposed constitution, ‘In the name of Almighty God.’  After rejecting that wording and another offered by William P. Chilton, the provisional Congress voted four states to one to put ‘Invoking the favor of Almighty God’ in the provisional constitution.  When the Confederate Congress adopted a permanent constitution,…it invoked not only the favor but the ‘guidance of Almighty God.’  The Confederate Congress also put the phrase ‘Deo Vindice’ [with God as protector] on the national seal….

“In addition to endowing the Confederate government with religious authority, some members of its Congress wanted to establish its moral powers as well…Religious freedom was important, Chilton argued, but preserving it did not mean that Congress must pass laws that ‘ignore the existence and overruling Providence of the Supreme Being’ or that contravene ‘His known will.’  Since the Confederate government ‘professes to “invoke the favor and guidance of Almighty God,” it should not’ trammel ‘His statutes’ nor defy ‘His authority.’ Nor should the government ‘do violence to religion and the moral sense of the community.’”

Moral Reconstruction:  Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865 - 1920. Chapter One, The Antebellum Moral Polity by Gaines M. Foster (2002). p.19 - 20.

A Soldier's Prayer by Bob Graham

Sound familiar?  Substitute “The Confederacy” with today’s misreading of the American Constitution and The Declaration of Independence.

Glenn Beck says that “what made America unique was that it was founded on divine providence…Like[America's founders]I believe that the true secret to our country’s success is the belief that our rights are given to us by God and lent to our government only so they can protect our rights to life and liberty while we pursue happiness.” What Beck won’t quote is Thomas Jefferson’s entire statement about “Question with boldness.” Given Beck’s passion for our founders, why would he omit this quote?  Could Beck actually agree with the Confederates’ call to slavery to a God?

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

“The Constitution…contained no appeal to God for sanction or guidance…The Constitution left both religion and morality to the states. The First Amendment…did nothing to undermine the secular nature of the new federal government. Rather, the Bill of Rights, of which it was a part, affirmed and codified the Revolution’s emphasis on individual liberty. The First Amendment did not apply to the states, of course. Most provided some acknowledgment of God’s guidance in their constitutions, and in all, regulating public morality remained…a “crucial obligation.” Even the states, though, disestablished religion. Starting in Virginia in 1785 and ending in Massachusetts in 1833, all of the states that had once had established churches separated church and state.”

Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865 - 1920. Chapter One, The Antebellum Moral Polity by Gaines M. Foster (2002). p.9.

I have three relatives who voted the America-hating, America-destroying bastard in.  At least one of them donated over $200.00 to his campaign.  Two do not speak to me.  These two have brilliant minds, so they have to know it is the enemy they were helping to infiltrate into my America.  The other one is plain stupid.  This one gave me a lecture on why I’m wrong.  It stood there spewing out every platitude ever uttered by any slimy leftist.  My response to that was, “Did you say something?  I didn’t hear it.”  It gets information from the films of Michael Moore and who knows what modern rap “music” and other junk.  I count these relatives as evil people – enemies whom I cannot relate to.  Because:

“Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

‘”Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify….

“Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves . . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.”

–Ayn Rand, “The Age of Envy”, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 152.
__________________________

Where did this evil originate? How does it manifest itself? These answers can be found in an article “Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil” by Andrew Bernstein.

The following are some passages from this rather long important article. He says there are three variations on it, all contributing but only one the source of the evil in today’s world. The other two share many components, but are simply derivatives. They are the common criminals, the religionists and the collectivists.

Bernstein writes:

But where does this view originate? How did truth become a matter of what the group believes? What about an individual discovering reality as it is and on his own, regardless of the group he belongs to? How did truth become social?

The answer lies in the theories of the German philosopher who dominated the thinking of the nineteenth century in general and of Karl Marx in particular. That philosopher is G.W.F. Hegel.

Hegel applies [Immanuel Kant's] social primacy of consciousness view to politics. If the collective creates the world, Hegel argues, then it is logical to conclude that the collective must be the source of right and wrong and that it must be all-powerful regarding social issues. The group as a whole, and its emissary, the state, gives orders and the individual obeys. This is the birth of state-worship in modern Western culture.

This is the essence of Kant. This represents an all-out attack on the mind and on man. What logically follows, and what historically does follow, is a culture of destruction; an orgy of hatred, a full-scale war on every requirement of man’s survival. Kant and his heirs attack the mind, the root cause of all human values. His contemporary followers necessarily attack every consequence of that cause. The statists attack freedom; the socialists attack the profit motive; the ethnicity-worshippers and racists attack individualism; the multiculturalists attack Western Civilization; the modern artists attack objectivity; the feminists attack masculinity; the environmentalists attack science, technology, progress and prosperity.

The modern collectivists are nihilists. Nazis and Communists slaughter millions and lay waste to continents. Their purpose is neither to steal money nor to exalt God. Their purpose is to destroy the mind and to rain destruction. In The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff gives an eloquent description of the modernist mentality:

The term that captures twentieth-century culture – the term that names the modern soul is: nihilism.

“Nihilism” in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the desire to lash out at the hated object, to wound, to disfigure, to destroy it.

The essence and impelling premise of the nihilist-modern is the quest for destruction, the destruction of all values, of values as such, and of the mind. It is a destruction he seeks for the sake of destruction, not as a means, but as an end.

The essence of the struggle between good and evil is summed up in Hank Rearden’s words from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was destroying the world.

Little Men
Robert Tracy
Watercolor
11½ x 14¼”
1991
Collection: National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, Chicago.
“Little Men” was slang for Vietcong or North Vietnamese Soldiers.

He felt as if, after a journey of years through a landscape of devastation, past the ruins of great factories, the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant – and had a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a human step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours.

This is the deepest reason why the modernists are, without exception, collectivists in their politics – because these are the politics of enslaving and destroying the good.

Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil
By Andrew Bernstein

Be sure to read Bernstein’s last paragraph first, because his article is non-fiction.  Then read the article and see if he’s made his case.

Glenn Beck does not see the connections among Anita Dunn, Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa.

Anita Dunn is the interim White House Communications Director.

From the October 15 edition of Fox News’ Glenn Beck:

DUNN [video clip]: Two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa — not often coupled with each together, but the two people that I turn to most.

BECK: Mao Zedong, one of the worst murderers in mankind’s history, probably the worst.

BECK: Two people — I can understand Mother Teresa.

What does that mean, Mr. Beck?  “I can understand Mother Teresa.”

“I think it’s a travisty that she used Mother Theresa and Chairman Mao in the same tone.”
–quote from a comment on MEDIAMATTERS forum.

I have to believe this is what Beck means.  One can only presume that Beck approves of Mother Teresa.  Let us explore this raisin-faced saint.

Does a Mother Teresa have any redeeming values?

NP: No. Mother Teresa was a distributor of the wealth of others–she didn’t create anything and she damned the very people who’s wealth she distributed. Most of the support for her mission came from well-heeled donors in America, a country she condemned as being ‘morally *impoverished’* because of its great wealth. Now realize, Mother Teresa was condemning the very source of the wealth she relied upon to fund her mission. Why? Because Mother Teresa had no respect for people who are mere producers and even less for those who made their own lives their standard of value. According to her, these individualists are the very people who are the ‘most poor’ and the ones most in need of abandoning whatever selfish activity they are engaged in so they can “give until it hurts”.

Politically, such a view of ultimately must lead to some form of statism, be it communism, socialism or some sort of “third way”…”.

(emphasis mine)

CAPITALISM MAGAZINE

From personal email correspondence:

The writer:  “He’s religious, but his faith is very compartmentalized, and I haven’t heard him talk about abortion, although I know he must be “pro-life” (if ever there was a misnomer). I do strongly disagree with him on immigration (he wants to build a fence, and says illegal immigrants are stealing “American jobs”). However, I enjoy listening to him on just about everything else, and he uses humor to ridicule our enemies at a time when humor is so needed. His motto, which he paraphrased from Jefferson is, “Question with boldness. Speak without fear”, and he does so in the face of enormous opposition from both the rest of the media and the government. I understand that many others in Objectivism do not share my opinion of him, but I have great respect for what he’s doing and I think he’s about as good as the culture will get as a prominent popular voice until it becomes more rational.”

My answer:  “Glenn Beck is courageous and a hero.  For that I love the man.  Early I heard him state the full Jefferson quote including “…even the existence of God.”  I don’t recall him repudiating that part and was shocked that he quoted it.  His current three quotes including the Washington is just what America needs for a great start.  A “popular voice”?  Precisely what Objectivism needs.  What a feat that would be!  Popularize Objectivist morality at the least.  I understand that ethics cannot be isolated from the totality of the philosophy.  So it looks like a pipe dream.

“To clarify my bringing in my combat experience.  It comes down to this:  fear mounts before the mission begins and escalates once on the ground.  When hit (in my unit, Reconnaissance, we were never to initiate a battle, so it was always an ambush by the enemy) our training (in today’s battle–Objectivist philosophy as best as each of us grasps it) kicked in.  Fear turned to courage and honor for our brother warriors.  Mentally and physiologically I’ve never been so alive!  If Yaron Brook was in battle while serving in the IDF he knows.  I have Objectivist friends who were in Vietnam, but never in combat.  Yet they too know.

Read or re-read  “Just War Theory” vs. American Self-Defense

The Artist as Vietnam Veteran
Robert Tracy
Oils on canvas
20 x 16″
1991
Collection, National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, Chicago

“The two major parts of the American Revolution involved the power of philosophy and military force.  We are involved in a second American Revolution brought to us in large part and most immediately by the bastard in the White House.  The mostly silent, or rather unheard outside of Objectivists, is the power of Objectivist philosophy.  If there is a single Objectivist in the military today who can expose this “Just War Theory” and silently prepare for a mutiny against the bastard when the time is right, the military could be the vehicle that brings Objectivist philosophy to America.  Another pipe-dream.  A fantasy.  Maybe.  I remember hearing that Ronald Reagan had no chance of winning election.  I was reading at the time Alan Drury’s “Advise and Consent” and gave my wife a prediction that Reagan would win by a landslide which of course did happen.

“Sounds like a novel, a thriller.  We’ll see….”