Today, while recuperating from the flu, my 6-year-old was watching Muppet Treasure Island, and he asked my husband, “What kind of animal is Gonzo?” Well, here’s the answer, and if that one doesn’t float your boat, how about the true identity of the White House chief of staff, Rahm “Animal” Emmanuel:

I just hung up from a conference call with US Congressman Mark Schauer. I don’t know how it is I was phoned. The whole process was set up by his office. Apparently, people throughout Michigan were randomly called and were allowed to listen in on the conversation. There appeared to be a mechanism where one could ask the Congressman questions and in answering the question you were allowed to hear the Congressman’s response to political questions. We were periodically told that if we wanted to ask a question we should push #3. I pushed #3 but never got a chance to ask a question. I wanted to ask the Congressman where in the US Constitution he and the government found the authority to spend 800 billion dollars. I also wanted to ask what a provision to create health care bureaucracy was doing in this legislation.

Anyway, having said all that, allow me to tell you that if the microcosm of the Michigan citizens I heard tonight is representative of the American public at large, we are so toast as a nation. The Michigan citizens who asked questions (assuming it wasn’t rigged) were all statist. They all asked in one form or another what the stimulus package was going to do for their special interest. An auto worker from Eaton Rapids phoned in and wanted money for the auto industry. A senior citizen from Grand Ledge phoned in wanting to know what money was in the legislation for senior citizens. (She also was offended that people wanted to criticize the President, who was, after all, only trying to do what the great Franklin Roosevelt did.) A guy from Washtenaw called in complaining that Wall Street shouldn’t have got bailed out but rather guys like him should have got bailed out. A guy from Charlotte called in who has been trying to sell a house for over a year and he wanted to know what the government was going to do to help houses sell more briskly. Are we beginning to see a theme here?

As long as Americans believe it is the job of the state to provide nourishment and it is their job to suck at the teat of government we will continue to spiral into tyranny and oppression. I fear that the one two punch of government schools and mass media over the course of several generations have effectively rendered the citizenry (at least the sampling from Michigan I listened to tonight) brain dead. There is no desire for freedom, but instead a long plaintive cry to be fed, taken care of, and to have their diapers changed. People really have come to believe that in the state we love and move and have our being. People really have come to the point where they are looking to the state for salvation. People really would prefer security to liberty. This mindset which I repeatedly note as being part of the American psyche, was born out in spades in this telephone conference this evening. It was most discouraging.

Congressman Schauer was unfailingly courteous, but then nobody he spoke to was disagreeing with the BS he was shoveling. Congressman Schauer made it clear that there is going to be a huge push for alternative energy. Carbon fuel is out and bio-fuel, wind energy, and other forms are in. According to Congressman Schauer this bill provides money to invest in “green cars.” Congressman Schauer noted that it was his hope that some of those cars would be built in Michigan. Interestingly enough there was a great deal of talk about ending free trade in favor of fair trade. Congressman Schauer said a great many things that were untrue. I don’t think Congressman Schauer purposely is a liar but rather it is my opinion that his false worldview causes him to speak lies that he genuinely believes are true. Most of his lies had to do with how this spending is going to help the economy and how this is all the previous administrations fault and how doing something is better than doing nothing and how every $1.00 spent by the government will result in a $1.50 return in the economy. This is Keynesianism that has long since been proven as completely false. Congressman Schauer also faulted people who just wanted to continue to pursue the failed ‘tax cuts for the rich’ policy pursued by the Bush administration. The obvious answer to this is that tax cuts without spending cuts was irresponsible — indeed almost as irresponsible as pursuing a policy to go deeper in debt through irresponsible spending legislation in order to solve being in debt.

What is sad about all of this is that these people have so few that can challenge them from rank and file America. What is sad is that Americans are largely drones that have been reared and trained to keep the machinery of our fascist culture running and consequently have not be reared and trained to ask questions about the nature of the machine. People need to quit warning about coming fascism or socialism. We already are far into Huxley’s Brave New World.

For two days now, the country has been a safer place for our children as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) has been in force since being passed and signed into law by President Bush last summer. This new law requires that all items sold to children twelve and under be tested for lead and phthalates, and if those items do not meet the limits of parts per million (limits which will be drastically increased within a few months), then the item may not be sold, or even donated to charity. Small businesses and charities must also comply with these restrictions or face stiff fines and even a prison sentence. The cost of testing each unique item is so onerous to those who deal in used children’s book selling and who have home businesses, and the cost of being prosecuted for not being in compliance with this law is so high, that many are closing shop and giving up. Even libraries and thrift stores have indicated they do not have the resources to meet these restrictions and thus will discontinue making children’s items available. This is a major blow to those who have relied on such resources for obtaining low-cost clothing, toys, and books for their families.

There have been many confusing and conflicting statements regarding the scope of this law and how it will be enforced. While there have been some assurances that small businesses which do not knowingly sell items with unacceptable amounts of lead and phthalates will not be prosecuted, such assurances from government bureaucrats, when those exemptions are not written into the law, do not encourage those who wonder if they might be the guinea pig for selective enforcement of this overreaching law. Sadly, even the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), whose experience with such selective enforcement in the realm of home education ought to cause them to know better, offered some hollow head-patting to those who have written them with concerns. While it’s nice to know that in their meeting with Commissioner Thomas Moore they were given some verbal assurance that the CPSC has no intention of going after cottage industries (”Historically, we haven’t gone after these kinds of businesses,” he told HSLDA, “not cottage industries”), many are not willing to stake their livelihood and freedom on such flimsy stuff.

As I write, precious and collectible children’s books are being dumped and destroyed because of this broad-brush nanny state intrusion. This is unacceptable at so many levels. During a time when families are suffering because of government bungling causing major economic disruption, a significant resource for providing income as well as necessary supplies to those families has now virtually disappeared. In addition, the arbitrary policy of this law to place specific restrictions on children’s books published prior to 1985 is appalling to those of us who know how insipid the content of most modern children’s literature is, and who prefer to provide older books, many of which are now out of print, for our children’s education and training. Who would have thought that overnight such material in our “free” country would become contraband and difficult to acquire? If I were into conspiracy theories (you can decide for yourself if I am), I might wonder if it was also a deliberate attempt to control the content of what we are able to teach our children as the noose tightens and the means to give them a quality, low-cost home education is now hampered? I would think that would be of grave concern to HSLDA.

Valerie Jacobsen, who more than anyone is responsible for my knowledge of good children’s books, and whose livelihood will be significantly affected by CPSIA, is writing extensively about this issue at Bookroom Blog. She wryly pays homage to George Orwell because of the “bright line” drawn for “acceptable” books published after 1985:

Dear Mr. Orwell,

Children’s books were invented after 1984.

Before 1985, there was no Dick. There was no Jane. There was no McGuffy. No boy named Tom painted a fence, ‘Anne’ didn’t end with an ‘e’, and no one had yet thought of putting ”pictures or conversation” on paper for children.

In fact, children didn’t learn to read in the old, old days before our Leaders saved us from our long, dark night. Back in 1984, there was only a dry wasteland of technical books, encyclopedias, service manuals, and other books for adults.

How thankful we are that times have changed so that children can learn to read and have their own books! We owe a great debt to the Great Change–and to Henry Waxman and Bobby Rush who accomplished it!

And we remember the Honorable Thomas Hill Moore, who worked for them….

Sincerely,

Valerie Jacobsen
Bookseller

She also notes that Commissioner Moore, whose verbal reassurances were passed on by HSLDA, stated that children’s books published before 1985 should be “sequestered” and kept from children. I’m sure we are all glad we live in a place where there is such concern for the health and safety of our little ones. I may have to put some yellow crime scene tape over the children’s section of my own home library in order to protect my at-risk children. Big Brother knows what they need.

Note: Valerie has helpfully given information about who to contact in Washington, D.C. to protest this craziness, and to exercise belligerently our right to say what we think about it. Let’s make some calls.

Historically, in the history of Christian Missions, any individual or people groups of an indigenous culture that the Missionaries were serving in that converted to Christian just for the advantages that Christianity brought were often referred to as a “Rice Christians.” Often times these conversions were in name only as attachments to the previous religion that they were thought to have left was retained in subtle ways and so the label “Rice Christians” became a pejorative. Basically the reality of “Rice Christians” was that their loyalty to Christ was purchased at the price of social or material advantage. Once that social or material advantage went into eclipse so did their loyalty to Christ.

Today in our current climate I am convinced that something like this is happening in America in  reference to the religion of statism. Legion are the name of those whose loyalty belongs to the state so long as the state can provide them with material or social advance. But what is to happen when the state runs out of provision for these Rice Americans? What will it mean for our nation when people lose their loyalty to the state because the state can no longer provide — especially when there is no religion for them to go back to with which they are already familiar? I am fairly certain that families who have been Rice Americans for several generations are not going to deal peacefully if their god and their religion can no longer provide for them.

But I suppose this scenario could never play out since the states supply for Rice Americans is doubtless inexhaustible.

“This fact is necessary to understand if we are to know what ’statist sovereignty’ means. The sovereign state seeks to command the present and the future; therefore, it seeks to command the past. This means, first, the reshaping of man’s memory of the past, his history, by means of the social sciences. George Orwell, in 1984 gave an account of this statist revision of all aspects of time, past, present, and future, as a basic tool for the control of man. The decline of family life and solidarity is important to this reshaping of mans past, because a man’s family is basic to his sense of time and history. It gives us our place in the world. The humanistic school seeks to supplant the family and become the new agency of contextualism. What is man’s context? Is it God, the family, a calling, and the like, or is it the state as the life of man? If man is made rootless by statist education, then man loses his strength of context and roots. Second, if the state and the school are now seen as the creators of the future, then the future comes from the state and not from God.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Sovereignty – pp. 158

1.) Note the inter-relationship between past, present and future. If the state is to control man’s present and future he must control man’s understanding of his past. This is why Biblical history is so important. If we do not read and learn history beginning and ending with God the result is that we will read history beginning and ending with the anti-Christ presuppositions of their controllers. The consequence of being able to control the interpretation of the past is the assurance of being able to control the interpretation of present and hence the future. Men are launched into the future by their understanding of their past. If the state can control the interpretation of history (social science) the state can control how the citizen defines the self.

2.) This quote reveals the necessity of the elite, charged with the formation of the “new Democratic man,” to also control the immediate context of individuals. This is one reason why the state continues to seek to institutionalize children in schools at earlier and earlier ages. The goal is to peel away a child’s identity and self understanding away from the family unit, attaching them instead to the identity found in the state and a self-understanding as given by the state. The effect of this is to subtly change the child’s primary loyalty from his or her family to the state. The fact that most American parents don’t sense this happening to their children doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen to their children but rather likely means that the parents also have accepted their identity and self understanding against the context of the state.

3.) If the state succeeds in being the agency that controls the past, present, and future of its citizenry then the state will have effectively gathered to itself the ability to predestine. Success, on the part of the state of providing the context whereby man finds his meaning yields to the state the status of creator of a closed system whereby the state can state the beginning from the end.

4.) Statist sovereignty requires the state to continue to absorb the sovereignty of other sovereignty jurisdictions. Biblical sovereignty decentralizes sovereignty and works to diffuse sovereignty between Family, Church, and the Civil realm. This has the effect of (a)reinforcing the sui generis sovereignty of God over all, (b)of creating diverse covenantal contexts wherein men are attached by distinct, yet complimentary loyalties, and © insuring that no monolithic institution arises to challenge the unique sovereignty of God.