IT’S THE STATUE OF “LIBERTY,” NOT THE STATUE OF “FREE STUFF”

“The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country
‘enlightening the world,’
or even Patagonia,
is ridiculous in the extreme!”

~The Cleveland Gazette (Editorial)




      Liberal philosophy would have us believe that the Statue of Liberty was created as some kind of invitation to any old “huddled masses” on the planet to come live in America, no strings attached – except of course to vote Democratic. Liberals seem to believe that the statue, and the poem attached to its base were created at the same time, and that the two ideas are one and the same.
      Which is why they are so angry with President Trump’s suggestion that our immigration policy should be skewed to those immigrant hopefuls who can actually enrich our nation in some tangible way. In other words, people who will not drain our resources and who will probably not vote Democratic.
       On the other hand, some folks think this Verdigris Lady by the Bay may actually represent a kind of Trojan Horse gifted to us by the French. Here’s the real story:
       In 1865, almost a century after America’s Declaration of Independence, French law professor and politician Édouard René de Laboulaye, apparently made an unofficial gesture, I suspect at a French State dinner attended by the ghost of Ben Franklin, that any monument raised to American independence would most properly be a joint project of the French and American peoples. Perhaps the Union victory in America’s Civil War and liberté for America’s slaves spurred his generous gesture. Or perhaps it had something to do with France’s seeking America’s help in getting permission to build the Panama Canal? (France began actual work on the Canal in 1881, but was stymied by engineering problems and disease. The US completed the canal, which was officially opened in August, 1914.)

      Word of de Laboulaye’s gallant gesture soon reached French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who decided to fashion just such a monument. Bartholdi’s hometown in Alsace had just passed into German control in the Franco-Prussian War, probably influencing his own thoughts on independence, liberty, and self-determination. The sculptor’s early models were all similar in concept: a statuesque robed female figure in neoclassical style after Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, wearing the stola and pella (gown and cloak of Roman goddesses). She bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. The lighted torch is a welcoming signal to immigrants (or is it the wind-blown mane of a sneaky stallion? A bit more background before we get to that).
 
     It is not readily visible, but a heavy broken chain symbolizing the freeing of America’s slaves lies at her feet. Miss Liberty’s rather stern face was modeled after that of Charlotte Beysser Bartholdi, the sculptor’s mother. Momma Charlotte, stern symbol of liberty and of the United States. Oh, ma mère!


      Well, the whole idea wasn’t exactly embraced by Americans. There was criticism both of Bartholdi’s proposed design (“Shouldn’t it be designed by a natural born citizen of the U.S.?” critics asked) ...and this “gift” required Americans to foot the bill for a large and expensive pedestal. It might have gone over much better if she looked like Bridget Bardot, held a menu, and hoisted a bottle of vintage grenache noir. But alas, looking a Trojan Gift Horse squarely in the mouth, debate raged on in America for many years.

      Meanwhile, designer Bartholdi was busy with other projects. Perhaps he thought, well, if those unwashed Americans don’t appreciate my fantastic design (which he actually patented!), I’ll look elsewhere for some other saps. Thus, he approached Isma’il Pasha, Egypt’s Viceroy of the Sultan of Turkey, with a proposal to build a huge lighthouse in the same fashion as our Miss Liberty. Now she was dolled-up like an ancient Egyptian, still sheathed with the copper robe and holding a torch aloft. She was to be erected at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, at Port Said. Sketches and dimensional models were made of the proposed work. Cleverly, Bartholdi had based his proposal on one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes, an enormous bronze statue of the Greek god, Helios, destroyed by a massive earthquake in 225 BC. The Colossus is believed to have been just under 100 feet high, and stood at the harbor entrance at Rhodes, guiding ships into the harbor. To his chagrin, Bartholdi’s proposal was politely rejected.
 
      Fundraising for our statue began in 1882. Poet Emma Lazarus was asked to donate an original work as part of an art auction dedicated to the cause. She initially declined, stating she could not write a poem about a statue. Maybe she didn’t like Bartholdi’s mother either. But being that Emma was involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and who were living in deplorable conditions which the wealthy Lazarus had never experienced, she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees: the Statue of Liberty. Her sonnet, “The New Colossus,” includes the iconic lines “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” which have become uniquely identified with the Statue of Liberty, and inscribed on a plaque at its base. But the very next line of Emma’s tome starts to remind us of today’s immigration problems; “The wretched refuse of your teeming shores.”
       “The wretched refuse.” Such a poetic description of our immigrant forebears.

      Fundraising for the yet-to-be-built pedestal lagged. Grover Cleveland, then governor of New York, vetoed a bill to provide $50,000 for the statue project in 1884. An attempt to have Congress provide $100,000 failed when Democratic representatives, always champions of liberty and freedom, would not agree to the appropriation. The New York committee, with only $3,000 in the till, suspended work on the pedestal. Groups from Boston and Philadelphia, among others, offered to pay the full cost of erecting the statue in return for relocating it, naturally, to their dominions.

      Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, a New York newspaper, announced a drive to raise the $100,000 (about $3 million in today’s dollars). Pulitzer pledged to print the name of every contributor, no matter how small their donation.

      Five months later, in the summer of 1885, the World announced $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, 80 percent of the total having been received in sums of less than one dollar! No, it was not completely funded by hundreds of thousands of grammar school kids who each donated a penny or two; but there were many schools, both here and in France, whose students did donate what they could.

      Meanwhile, the statue itself was being constructed in France. The engineering specified copper sheeting, folded in a newly discovered technique which allowed the sheets to be thinner (just 2.4 mm!) thus using less material and lightening the big girl’s weight. The copper came from multiple sources; some of it may even have come from a mine in Norway. According to Cara Sutherland, in her book on the Statue, 200,000 pounds of copper were called for. French copper industrialist Eugène Secrétan donated 128,000 pounds. Historian Yasmin Khan, states that the firm of Japy Frères, copper merchants, donated a good deal of the copper, which today would be valued around $354,000.

      When completed, the gal’s parts were crated and shipped to America by ocean freighter. 200,00 people lined the New York docks, and hundreds of boats put to sea to welcome the Isère and her curvaceous copper cargo.

     The statue was carefully assembled on the completed pedestal, located on what was then called Bedloe’s Island. Completion of the Statue was marked by New York’s first ticker-tape parade and a ceremony of dedication was held on the afternoon of October 28, 1886. Again presiding over the huge event was Grover Cleveland, but this time as President of The United States. A painting by Edward Moran gives us some idea of what a grand event this must have been.


      Interestingly, over the years, the statue’s exterior surface began to show copper’s usual verdigris colored oxidation. At first, the plan was to remove the oxidation and completely paint the exterior, but chemical testing revealed the verdigris actually offered some protection to the copper surfaces, so her painting was left to nature, accounting for the statue’s beautiful bright green color.
      

      Shortly after the dedication, The Cleveland Gazette, an African-American newspaper, suggested that the statue’s torch not be lit until the United States became a free nation “in reality.”

      The Gazette editorialized “ ‘Liberty enlightening the world,’  indeed! The expression makes us sick.” Keep in mind this was just about twenty years after the freeing of America’s African-American slaves.

      The Gazette editorial continued, “This government is a howling farce. It can not or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders.” (Do you begin to hear the Trojan Horse whinnying?) The Gazette declared; “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family... The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme!”
 
     And speaking of the ridiculous, while the Statue and its island are actually on the Jersey side of the NJ/NY border, the Statue is considered to be New York territory. This is most odious, rather gauche, lending an air of unseemliness to the whole affair.
 
     Trojan Horse? In his important work, Man’s Search For Meaning,  Viktor Frankl recommended “That the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast should be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
 
      “Freedom,” he insists, “Is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth... Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.”

      Because of liberal philosophy, perhaps better described as obsession, Miss Liberty’s gracious “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” has been overly broadly interpreted as an invitation to anyone, the wretched refuse from anywhere, to come to America to enjoy not only our liberté, but all the unearned free benefits showered upon today’s immigrants, legal or not. While supporters assault dissenters with charges of racism, elitism, lack of sympathy for children, stinginess and a whole host of propaganda, the time has long passed when Americans will fall for that disingenuous liberal baloney. We all know uneducated immigrants are invited here for the exclusive purpose of increasing voter base for Democrats, whose operating theory of democracy is that in most cases (though perhaps not in our most recent Presidential Election) it only takes a tiny bit more than half the vote to gain re-election. Forever. Unfortunately it appears to many of us that Republican leaders don’t much object to the invitations either, because immigrants represent an unending flow of low-wage workers. Although recent government statistics suggest vast numbers of today’s illegal immigrants do not seek to work.

      Today, the French are learning the hard way that liberté sans responsabilité eventually leads to cultural chaos and even economic collapse. Under the weight of masses of the under-educated, culturally alienated, wretched refuse, America’s economy too approaches crisis.

      Today’s illegal immigrants are not the legal European immigrants of the past two centuries, whose industriousness and drive successfully blended the best of their cultures with America’s. In the great era of European emigration to America (about 1890 to 1930) the total number of immigrants from all European nations, was only about 7 million. This new brand of illegal immigrant arrives with ingratitude and no apparent desire to be Americanized in the “melting pot.” The wretched refuse now brings with it the very cultures – many antithetical to the very idea of liberty for their own people – from which it runs in fear and desperation.

      Perhaps the old Cleveland Gazette call to “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean...” was a bit extreme, but in today’s circumstances it might be worth considering snuffing the torch for awhile. Until we can absorb or integrate, or educate, or repatriate those millions of poor, huddled masses yearning to get free stuff.

(The Statue of Responsibility is a proposed national monument structure to be built on the West Coast. The prototype, sculpted by project artist Gary Lee Price, symbolizes primarily the responsibility that comes with liberty.)

OBAMA, THE CONSTITUTION AND THE ZAMBONI

(Updated 7/22/14)

America’s mainstream media is Obama’s Zamboni. Let us explain why.

Unless our President has an unlikely epiphany, The Constitution is well on its way to becoming irrelevant, a tattered historic relic.

Mr. Obama, we are told, was a “Professor of Constitutional Law” which, if true, is what makes his administration doubly dangerous to America’s Founding Documents. A “legal scholar” knows which loopholes to exploit, in this case to concentrate more and more power into the presidency while diminishing the influence of the other two branches. It’s fairly obvious these days how the Executive Branch dominates, while the lawmakers of Congress, and its ultimate interpreters, the Supreme Court (despite a few recent decisions rebuking Executive fiat) have been reduced to endless, ineffectual committees and very expensive rubber stamps.

Is this not the very thing our Founders crafted The Constitution to avoid? Is this not what they pledged fortune and life to avoid? Is this not what our nation’s dearest blood was shed to avoid? Was not our Founders primary goal to keep us free of kings, emperors, dictators and tyrants?

It appears, according to some outspoken Senators as well as many members of the House, that, unable to get the Republican House to go along with his agenda of “change,” the President has chosen to operate far out in the borderlands of Constitutional interpretation: circumventing law by fiat; using his “pen and phone” in an almost casual way; persuading the heads of our bureaucracies to go along, not by direct order, but by making his will obvious to the sycophants in the Federal bureaucracy, who then carry out his wishes seemingly without conscience. When caught, they simply lie to Congress, and that, it seems, is that. And why wouldn’t they? If anything, they are promoted to continue their mischief in another tentacle of the bureaucracy. And shockingly, because the President apparently detests it, this includes the mightiest military the world has ever seen!

It shocks me because until now, I never would have believed so many in our nation would be so quick, so willing, to go along with a president on an aggressive, shady campaign against plain ordinary American tradition. From the IRS to the NSA, HHS, DHS and the US Armed Forces, just to mention a few initials, Big Brother increasingly aims its unblinking eyes and digital ears on its own patrons – the taxpayers of America! Those military leaders of General rank who may stand in opposition to the President’s agenda, on the grounds that they took and oath to obey and protect The Constitution, seem to, to quote one such famous General “...Just fade away.”

The Senate seems cowed into going along, or at least pretends to be. The House, unable to muster enough courage to stop the trampling of Constitutional law, buries its head in the sands of endless committee investigations, and turns to the numb American public for support.

The Fourth Estate, granted special rights by the Constitution, seems to have willingly transformed itself into a Stalinist-style propaganda arm of the Administration, feeding the unwashed a daily dose of attention diverting malarky. The President and his advisors know that the news cycle will force the media to overshadow today’s Presidential blunder with tomorrow’s bad news. Thus Fast & Furious is obscured by Benghazi which is obscured by a missing Malaysian Airliner which is obscured by The Crimea which is obscured by an invasion of kids at our southern border which is obscured by the Middle Eastern mess which is obscured by a Maylasian Airlines/Ukrainian/Russia mess. And tomorrow it will be something else, won’t it? The White House counts on it. It’s the smooth, transparent ice they skate on. The mainstream media is their Zamboni. Sycophants, all. Traitors to truth.

So, with uneducated and uninvolved voters mesmerized by electronic devices, games, sports, social media and all the rest, becoming a kind of permanently zombified majority, kept in thrall by government handouts, how exactly are those who oppose the destruction of our precious Constitutional rights supposed to help?

The very people paid to protect and educate us have turned against us.

Well, we are told, when We the People have lost faith in the Keepers of the Constitution, the options it grants us are clear; the most obvious being the vote. If conservatives and traditionalists can win back the Senate, and increase Republican House numbers so that presidential vetoes can be overturned, they may be able to reign in the chaos. Reign in the unheard-of levels of wasteful spending and borrowing.

But that very same voting system, itself the beating heart of a republic, in the hands of the “machine,” has been corrupted along with the rest of our Constitutional safeguards. Leftists, uber liberal groups in this country have been emboldened by the tepid resistance they’ve met virtually every step of the way, and will now do whatever it takes to keep their Democrat servants in power. And I mean anything it takes! They giggle now, mocking any attempt to paint them as what they are; insidious agents of a philosophy which has never improved anything anywhere. They have no fear of silly-hat-wearing Tea Party activists. Nor do we internet bloggers and patriots-in-the-aether have a tangible organization – an antibiotic strong enough to slow the steadily increasing infection.

There are other Constitutional suggestions for dealing with despots. No, not suggestions, sacred duties! When a majority of the citizens living in any territory have feel their government is not working to their benefit, it is their prerogative to dissolve that government and form a new one.

The only issue on which the nation seems to be united is its visceral dislike for and distrust of ObamaCare. While the President’s poll numbers continue to drop, he remains intransigent. This is not just his “signature legislation,” it’s one of the gold rings in the Socialist Merry-Go-Round. Once you are ensconced in government dictated healthcare insurance data banks, you might as well tattoo a number on your forehead. You are now officially reduced to a few bytes in the bottomless datapits of our arachnid-like bureaucracy. In 2014, Orwell’s “1980” is nothing more than a quaint idea. Each of the ABC agencies is becoming interlaced in a sticky spyweb aimed, not so much at our adversaries in other nations, but at you, the American Middle Class and the Wealthy. Because it is you, not foreign enemies, which the bureaucracy mistrusts most.

But this is America! Will we allow ourselves to be chained to this arcane “progressive” agenda? Have we ever measured our personal success in little units of government “permissions” or in degrading government handouts? Our (and especially our children’s) opportunities should be as boundless as America’s geography, limited only by our ethics, individual drive and whatever God-given talents we have been blessed with in this life. To paraphrase Lincoln, we should be left alone to enjoy our talents!

Conservatives, liberals, men, women, young and old, people of every belief ethnicity and color, ask yourselves; do we not all want the same thing? Freedom to live our lives unshackled by legions of bureaucrats! Do we need Big Brother and Sister to tell us how to live? Who we are? What we are “allowed” to have? Did we ever have “Them” standing right behind our doctors or teachers or bankers, dictating what medical treatment we are allowed to have, or what propaganda we are allowed to learn, or how much of our own earnings we are allowed to keep for ourselves? In the name of Righteousness, demand that your Congressmen take action to stop this rape of The Constitution. Demand it! Do not fear leaders who attempt to limit your freedom... right is on your side. And might resides in the great numbers of decent and common-sensical people in our nation.

If the big government juggernaut continues unchecked, this nation and its Constitution will be nothing more than part of the lackluster One World Socialist paradigm, with nothing more to distinguish it than a footnote in future history books: “Before becoming a Third World Nation, the United States was a Constitutional Republic, a nation of free men, a powerhouse of innovation, a world leader, trusted and looked up to by its allies, and respected and feared by its adversaries around the globe.”

A puppet of global socialists, a grinning Pinocchio, carved in Chicago, sleeps for twenty-five years in pews, marinating in the America-bashing Reverand Wright preaches. The President doesn’t seem to realize how his actions suggest he and the Mrs. feel no sense of gratitude toward the nation which provided them with so much. Or do they think they owe it nothing? He willingly humiliates it, spends it into insolvency, does his damndest to end its unparalleled historic success. All this he does, in his own spiteful words: to “Bring it down a notch.”

WAR: THE LONGER WE WAIT, THE WORSE THE SLAUGHTER

As much as it disgusts me, I have to admit the history of Man is war.

Hardly a day has elapsed in thousands of years of history without human blood being spilt in some godforsaken war. Ancient civilizations each had their own god of war who commanded “holy war” – usually in order to spread that god’s religion. As the embodiment of masculine aggression, the Roman god Mars was the force which drove their wars – though Mars (who paradoxically was also their god of agriculture) sanctioned wars that ideally delivered a secure peace. But even if war ends in “secure peace,” knowing Man’s history, how lasting can this security possibly be?

Alas, judging by the pages of history, ancient up to recent, there is certain inevitability to war.

Large wars, world wars, begin slowly, with antagonisms and outrages heaped one upon another, ill winds blow both ways across the deserts of negotiation, insults irritating egos over long periods of time. Eventually nationalism grows, and Thor’s hammer is raised in anger. But extended periods of relatively comfortable life, such as most Americans experience today, lead to increasingly trivial liberalism and soft bellies. People get more upset about their favorite team’s mascot, or the convolutions of laws about free birth control for women, than they get about the scandals surrounding their leaders or the dehumanizing treatment of their sisters and brothers around the world.

Eventually it sinks in to the general population. Something starts to feel very wrong, patience wears thin, and the people grow restive. For Mars regularly awakens from his agrarian slumber, the Valkyries decide who will die in battle while the charge building in Thor’s hammer begins to crackle, and Chi You’s six arms begin wielding his terrible sharp weapons.

Today, antagonists poke sticks in the eyes of what is derisively called “The Free World” or “The West,” and slowly the drums beat and many of us can feel the leashes of the dogs of war fraying from the strain.

If war is inevitable, its masters tell us there is only one way to wage it. Fast, and with finality. History’s warrior princes; the Caesars, Attila, Richard the Lionheart, Napoleon and all the rest taught us important lessons. When war is inevitable, the longer the more powerful faction waits, the more advantage is given to the enemy. While the stronger stalls, debating endlessly, hoping against hope that the enemy will magically turn into Boy Scouts, the enemy builds its army, its funding, its public relations and its strategy. We also know that the side inspiring fear has that additional advantage. Weakness of will, on the other hand, is a distinct disadvantage to be exploited by the other side.

And so here we are. With enemies our leadership cannot even bring themselves to call enemies. Enemies who have made it clear, by attacking us in our homeland, that we are their ultimate target. The Caesars would not have tolerated this without a devastating response. But our enemies now acquire territory, resources, cash and expertise, as they attempt to devour freedom as they did periodically over the last couple of millennia, turned back only by the blood of the bravest of men. This enemy has infiltrated our nation, institutions, media, religion, fund-raising groups, culture, while being celebrated, if not outright supported, by our leader’s inscrutable foreign policies, and the lapdog media.

Put yourself in the place of the enemy. Is it any wonder he sees a giant soft belly in America? He sees world leaders unwilling to stop him. Our enemies are emboldened, quite logically, by America’s inaction. But they, too, misread history. Compared to the unleashing of America’s secret war dogs, hell will seem like a cool day on the Riviera.

So our next president will be stuck with a terrible problem. Leading a population of soft, dependent voters, unaccustomed to hard choices, showing by their insatiable appetite for government benefits that they are unwilling to make sacrifices, unable to handle hard life on their own. Oh, not that there aren’t many ready, willing and able American patriots. You are the ones who will actually fight for everyone else’s freedom. As it has always been. Soldiers, according to Napoleon, are born to die.

The next president will have few allies who still have faith in America, and enemies who do not fear us. Halfway through his or her first term, the new president – because of our current president’s inaction – be forced to use weapons more devastating than any employed before. But the enemy could have been dealt a devastating blow just days ago in its new homeland, using conventional weapons, discouraging it and any other aggressors from heeding the call of Mars. But we are living with an administration unable or unwilling to understand the world and history, one which seems unable to grasp the realities of aggression. Worse, this incomprehensible inaction fuels the fires of suspicion; suspicion shared by many that the administration and its allies on the Left and in the Media are on the wrong side of this war.

Mark my words, because we have done so little to stop it, the next president will be forced – let me repeat that – forced to use terrible weapons to perform a president’s primary duty – to protect America. How will the next major conflict begin? Who will be the next Archduke Franz Ferdinand? Where will the next 9/11 happen? Or will it be a catastrophic blow to that tiny island of freedom and righteousness in a sea of turmoil, Israel? A belligerent attack on another nation’s airliner or naval vessel? An EMP attack taking out a good part of America’s grid and defensive systems? Cyber sabotage collapsing the internet and all attendant commerce? Or simply more violent chaos in the Levant which escalates and drags in nuclear nations?

WWIII may not last very long, but the blow to civilization and its economies will last far longer than anything we have experienced. Things will get rough here at home, and abroad. The longer we wait, the worse the disaster will be. The longer we wait, the worse the slaughter will be.

Like you, I hope there is a hero on the horizon... I don’t care where he or she is from... just someone with a foot big enough to tamp down the fuse before something wicked explodes. But it seems heros don’t come along to stop wars from starting, they usually emerge because of war.

Do you hear that sparking sound around the world? It may be Thor’s Hammer charging up. But the creaking sound is coming from the dry bones of Julius Caesar, George Washington and all the rest, shaking their heads slowly.