Telemarketers: Optional Responses

Jerry Seinfeld showed a classic response to a telemarketer once on his show. Today, I came across another response to a telemarketer. Check it out.

Cold Comfort Farm

Last night, Mary and I enjoyed watching Cold Comfort Farm. Not having heard of it in any way before, I went in with no expectations.

I came away loving it. Its sense of life is delightfully benevolent. The sprightly center of the story is played by Kate Beckinsale. Her performance in this film was the best I've seen in her films so far. My evaluation may be colored by the cheerfully unsinkable nature of the character she played.

If you get a chance, check it out and let me know what you think of it.

Ideals vs Self-Interest: A False Dichotomy

Near the end of His Excellency, Ellis writes

The second long-term pattern in his thinking about slavery was a relentlessly realistic insistence that ideals per se must never define his agenda; indeed, he associated an idealistic agenda with sentimental illusions, like the belief that American virtue was sufficient to defeat Great Britain in the war....

Try to reconcile that with this—Washington setting an historic precedent in surrendering his sword.

The fact is the American Revolution was not just political. It included an implicit moral revolution. The new moral code implied was that of rational selfishness. As such, Washington was wise to reject the idealism that kept the world in slavery and darkness for centuries. America's practice of slavery was part of that ancient legacy that had to be addressed and Washington struggled with it, as Ellis reports.

In the end, American virtue did defeat the British. A new ideal—the virtue of rational selfishness—drove the American force. It is secondary that not all Americans shared that ideal. What was crucial was that the leading thinkers —the Founding Fathers—embraced the ideal, with Washington chief among them, literally and figuratively.

So, although I disagree with Ellis' ethical orientation, I admire and appreciate his work in his biography of Washington. I got to see Washington as the great, real man he was, not just some impassive face perched on a mountain. I got to see how fitting it is that he is the father of our country—a deeply principled, intelligent, moral man of action.

At the same time, I am grateful to Ayn Rand for arming me with the ideas necessary to navigate around the kind of conventional errors Ellis makes in his review and analysis of Washington's life. My respect and admiration for Washington is all the richer and more personal.

Hamiltonian Power and "Behaving Responsibly"

A light went on when I made a connection between Ellis' comments on force being used to get "both individuals and sovereign states...to behave responsibly" and his report of Alexander Hamilton's dangerous quest for power.

Ellis reports on page 250...

In collusion with disaffected and disloyal members of Adams's cabinet, Hamilton had hatched a scheme to transform the Provisional army into a permanent military establishment and an instrument for his expanded power within the Federalist Party. To be fair, Hamilton had convinced himself that Napoleon's imperial ambitions did include North America....[H]e envisioned marching his army through Virginia, thereby intimidating the Republican leadership in its major sanctuary, then launching a preemptive invasion of Florida and the Louisiana Territory....

He goes on to report that "Washington was unwittingly providing the imprimatur of his name to this wild scheme...playing directly into Hamilton's hands....At any rate, the moment exposed the dangerous tendencies of Hamilton's genius once released from Washington's control."

Whoa. Hold up. The dangerous tendencies of Hamilton's genius? More like the dangerous logic of the idea of forcing people to "behave responsibly". Hamilton's scheme strikes me as terribly consistent with that premise.

I ain't lion!

Check out this amazing video.

Touching as it is...still...as a form of urging caution, I'll just say two words: Siegfried and Roy!

A Unified American Nation...for freedom

On page 202 of His Excellency, Ellis describes a 1790 attempt to end slavery. "Whatever [Washington's] personal views on slavery may have been, his highest priority was the creation of a unified American nation."

This formulation does not do justice to the magnitude of the deeper issue. A "unified American nation"? For what purpose?

America wasn't just a new nation. It was the first nation in history dedicated expressly to the idea of individual rights. It was radical. It still is, given how many are willing to give it up at the first sign of pressure.

But the point here is that it was fragile at its birth, as cited in Ellis' book. To be precise, protecting his own and his country's fragile freedom was Washington's highest priority and a unified American nation was the means to that end.

Did everyone understand that freedom? No. Was it universally applied immediately after millenniums of slavery across the world? No. The revolution had just started. Slavery was a horrible, "in your face" contradiction and the Founding Fathers knew it. Tragically, resolving that contradiction took time and rivers of blood.

Balance of Power

In my 2/7/08 post, I cited Ellis as follows:

Both individual citizens and sovereign states often required coercion to behave responsibly, which meant that the federal government required expanded powers of taxation and ultimate control over fiscal policy.

Among the problems with this claim, notice this core assumption: the federal government will "behave responsibly" in its use of coercion.

How right the Founding Fathers were to do everything in their power to assure a balance of power in our government. Too much power in one group's or one man's grasp is dangerous.

Check your premises.