|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Fourth of July Thoughts Lowell Ponte Mexican Presidential Election Mexico votes for a new President on Sunday, July 2. If the "conservative" Felipe Calderon wins, the influence of Venezuela's neo-Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, linked by Calderon ads to his Mexican opponent, will be weakened throughout the hemisphere. President George W. Bush's plans to erase our border with Mexico will continue full steam ahead. But if ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is elected Mexico's president, this will greatly strengthen the case for building a 40-foot wall across America's entire 2,000-mile border with a Mexico ideologically akin to Fidel Castro and Castro ally Chavez. An Obrador victory might therefore be the Minuteman movement's secret preference. World Cup Soccer
Only 6 percent of Americans are paying close attention to soccer's World Cup, whose matches have riveted television viewers nearly everywhere else on Earth. Despite decades of collectivist effort to push America's children into playing and loving soccer, this game attracts little enthusiasm here. Why? Some pundits speculate that soccer is too slow, boring and low-scoring for American tastes.
The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last surmises that soccer disgusts manly American males because its players constantly engage in what he calls "the flop-‘n'-bawl," falling to the turf and pretending to have been fouled and/or injured by the other team. This, wrote Last, violates masculine American ideals: "You play tough, you gain no advantage from being down, and you never, ever let the other guy see that you're hurt." It also shows that soccer is a sport based on "gaming" the referees as much as playing the game. Soccer is, therefore, a game perfectly designed for socialists from societies where government manipulation, not effort or ability, decides who wins and loses.
Story Continues Below
Politically Incorrect, I see soccer as a sissy game that is too much like dancing. God gave us hands. Why play mostly with feet (and hitting the ball with one's bare head, which is why soccer causes far more concussions and brain damage than does American football)? Other nations adore, and American men instinctively despise, soccer for another reason: It is a game puny males as well as large males can play. Meritocratic American males find this distasteful because size matters ... and is supposed to matter. In American games a man ought to weigh 300+ pounds to be a football lineman or stand at least 6'6" to play NBA basketball. A society's games reflect its character, and our social Darwinism keeps America strong precisely by favoring the biggest and strongest competitors in our national gene pool. Size in baseball matters less than quickness and hustle, making it our most "soccer-like" national game. But size even here often confers advantage. (So does left-handedness, with 40 percent of those in baseball's Hall of Fame either southpaws or switch-hitters, compared with only 10 percent in our population who are left-handed. Baseball's design gives lefty batters a shorter run to first base and southpaw pitchers an easier time holding runners on first.) Our games teach that bigger is better, an ideal that has helped America bestride the world like a colossus. Maybe this is why socialist softies are eager to brainwash our children into embracing soccer, a game of egalitarianism, tight control and tedious endurance rather than superiority, strength, size and direct physical contact. The British Empire was "won on the playing fields of Eton." Was it lost there when British children turned from cricket to soccer? Or is the World Cup one more proof that this empire lives on culturally because the world's favorite game came from Britain – rather like the English language of this column?
Flag-Burning Amendment The U.S. Senate this week fell one vote short of approving a constitutional amendment that read: "The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the Flag of the United States."
Among those supporting this amendment were Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and 2004 Democratic presidential standard-bearer Senator John F. Kerry. Flag burning is apparently a far more pressing problem than protecting America's borders or ending the Death Tax, through which our government literally picks the gold fillings from the teeth of deceased Americans. (Government refuses to stop this ghoulish re-taxation of already-taxed earnings for two reasons: because greedy politicians are addicted to the money it raises, and because dead people vote only in Chicago and hence cannot retaliate.)
I honor our flag, but something about this proposed amendment troubles me: its use of the word "desecration." The dictionary defines desecration as an act of sacrilege, i.e., a defiling of something "sacred." We love, honor and cherish our flag – but is it sacred, a divine object? Or is it merely the symbol of an earthly, not heavenly, kingdom – however noble that kingdom's ideals, and however many have sacrificed their lives in patriotic devotion to our ideals? Does this use of the word "desecration" turn the American flag into an object of idolatry, forbidden by Judeo-Christian scripture? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that burning the American flag is protected as a form of free speech. Oddly, however, one man was arrested in San Diego, California, for burning the United Nations flag. Another was recently arrested in Arizona for burning the Mexican flag. And a decade ago men in Modesto, California, were arrested for burning a cross on their own property – and charged with violating state air pollution laws. In an America busy banishing second-hand cigarette smoke, surely we could arrest flag burners for polluting the air – and contributing to global warming. (Check out NewsMax Magazine's July cover story about Al Gore's climate scam!) Under today's laws, the patriots behind the Boston Tea Party would be arrested, jailed and bankrupted by confiscatory government fines for polluting the waters of Boston Harbor.
The Star-Spangled Banner America's is the only national anthem that begins and ends with questions: "Oh, say can you see ...?" and "Does that star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?" On this glorious 2006 Fourth of July weekend, how would you answer those questions?
Editor's note:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2008 NewsMax.Com |