Body Parts

Robert Spencer Reviews The Detailed, Extraordinary Security Needed For Him To Speak At A College Campus

Spencer is one of the nation's most important spokespersons on the Jihad, identifying Muslim theology and the Koran as the intractable source of the violent Muslim assault on the West. Naturally, speaking the truth against the prevailing pc view of Islam makes him a target of fascist disruption by the Left fellow-travellers of the Islamists. This post is well worth reading to understand the extent to which free speech is threatened in the U.S. We are at the point where exercise of free speech requires physical courage as well as moral courage. Sounds like the 1930s to me.

McCain, Obama, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Strenuous Life

Does TR's address to the Hamilton Club of Chicago, in April 1899 provide the kind of message to which McCain responds when McCain says that he admires the first Roosevelt president? TR calls for Americans, as individuals, and America, as a nation, to step courageously and vigorously onto the world stage, to accept the responsibility that history had imposed on them. Shed its rhetorical anachronisms about empire, Roosevelt's speech foreshadowed a theme and a tone that JFK would announce, in his inaugural address in 1961, that a new generation had accepted. 

Roosevelt condemns the man who shirks effort and hard work, instead falling upon ease and comfort. Similarly, he contrasts the nation that retreats inside its borders, "taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day," to the nation that courageously grasps the sacrifice necessary to make the world a better place.

"The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills "stern men with empires in their brains"—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world's work, by bringing order out of chaos..."   

"If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill."

Of our present candidates for president, who is the timid man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man?

Our Neighborhood Is One Test

This Sunday morning, early as yesterday, Saturday, girls' softball teams competed in the park. Two teams played today, while two teams warmed up nearby the softball field. Both were Latino teams. The girls were ten to twelve years old. Fathers coached and refereed. Mothers sat on blankets and in aluminum chairs unfolded on the grass. The sun shone in a cloudless sky. It will be warm later, but now it was but 65 degrees farenheit, perfect for strenous playing. I walked my lab around the park, throwing a ball for her to retrieve. She raced to exhaustion, retrieving five times, then ten times, then fifteen times, skidding onto the ball, scooping it into her mouth, raising a spray of water from the green grass damp from overnight sprinkling.

Woodpeckers assaulted the trunks of palms, high in the trees, rousing the crows to a clamor of protest. The crows flocked to an old pecan tree. They dived onto branches, shaking off ripe pecans. Then they flapped onto the ground, chopping at the nuts, retrieving the pecan meats.

Two runners, one who looked to be teenaged, and the other a middle aged man, jogged the perimeter of the park like boxers, sweat bands over their foreheads and tape wrapped around their hands.

At the softball field, all four of the girls' teams had black swashbuckling trousers and were distinguished by the colors of their shirts and shirt trim. Black with red trim. White with black trim. Red with black trim. Black with white trim. They shouted encouragements to each other. Alternate pitchers practiced with their coaches; their fathers? Several family dogs barked excitedly, tethered to park benches.

One test of our society, raised by Nine-Eleven, is whether we can create safe neighborhoods where we can raise brave and active daughters and sons.  Both of my children were at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on the morning of Nine-Eleven. My son attended college with a dormitory at the Center. He was evacuated by police shortly after the North Tower was struck. The attack on Jews, which had been a published motive of the airborne Jihad, pushed him into Jewish activism. He responded by informing us that he was leaving college to go to Israel and join the IDF. Only hours of frightened pleading from his mother got him to agree to postpone this action until after he would graduate from college.

His sister lived in Brooklyn, in an apartment just off the Brooklyn Bridge, and worked in a bank in Midtown. Every morning, before going to work, she jogged over the Bridge into the World Trade Center, around the concourse, then back over the Bridge to get ready for work. So she did on the morning of Nine-Eleven, jogging around the Concourse, at seven oclock, at the same time that her brother was getting out of bed and heading for the dormitory wash room.

My daughter broke up with a boy friend of long standing on the evening of nine-ten. She explained later that she would have to take care of him, that he did not seem as if he would be of much help to her. She is a feminist, who graduated from UC Berkeley with honors in economics and women's studies. She was working her way toward a vice-presidency at her bank. She was proud of her independence.

Nine-Eleven destroyed the world in which my children could go jogging in the morning and prepare for school classes without fearing for their safety. My daughter was deeply affected by the attack on her world. Her apartment was a block from a fire station in Brooklyn that lost a half dozen of its firemen in the collapse of the Towers. For the following week, each evening, she walked to the firehouse with her neighbors. They laid flowers by the fire station, donated food, sang hymns, prayed, wept, and stood vigils to late in the night for the memory of the men who lost their lives.

What kind of a man did my independent, hard-working, achieving feminist daughter want, I asked some time later. I want, she said, a man who will rush into a burning building for me.

Not Bursting My Heart

While on a three-day break with my wife, at Rural Resort Village, I read Lance Armstrong's autobiography ("It's Not About the Bike"). I surprised myself by being gripped by his story. I don't much care about professional sports or athletes. I don't read the newspaper sports section, I don't watch sports cable tv, I have been to exactly one professional sports game/event in my life. In truth, games like baseball and basket ball don't offend me, they just bore me. Only occasionally does a sports event attract my attention, as recently the Tour de France. The number of biographies and autobiographies of professional athletes that I have read can be counted on one finger. I am the quintessential nerd: pocket protector in seventh grade, slide rule (that dates me!) by freshmen year high school, briefcase for books and papers by second year of high school, glasses with taped bridge by second year of college. I wore used a Good Will raincoat and carried an umbrella when no one - absolutely no one, except me - touched either in Rural University. My classmages went to sports events; I went to the library. I enjoyed tennis; but that's about it. I probably should have been put in a zoo.

But I read Lance Armstrong's autobiography, because I was curious about the athlete who won the Tour de France for the sixth time. He had much more to tell me, especially about how a body falls apart and how one puts it together again - a subject forced upon me now. I heard a commentator on Cable Channel 83, that covered the Tour daily, say that the Tour was all about pain, constant excruciating pain. The person who won was the person who could endure the most pain. Armstrong clearly had much to teach me. His autobiography won my sympathy and admiration. He is a nerd on bike. His continual measuring, recording, archiving, analyzing of performance was completely news to me. I had no idea; I thought you just trained to build up stamina and then jumped on a bike and rode off.

But he impressed me mostly because he is a leopard climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. He wrote that he rides with as much effort as he can, fearless that his heart might burst as he strives forward. "I had a lot to prove, to myself and everyone else -- and unless my heart exploded in my chest, I was not going to be last again." I never thought about any physical effort in those terms. Clearly that is element in the definition of a great athlete. It explains the terrible physical injuries and anatomical deconstruction the great athletes suffer. They push their performance to and beyond the limits of their bodies. I think of the injuries the Williams' sisters recently experienced that removed them from tennis competition for a year.

How does an intellectual do the equivalent with the mind?

Riddle

For a few years, I rode horses. I owned two - a gelding who was half-quarterhorse and half-thoroughbred and an Arabian mare. My wife named the little gelding, Riddle, because, when we bought him, we didn't know how he would turn out. He turned out to be an enthusiastic, brave trail horse. We rode the river bottom trails. The trails provided a wide variety of terrain - open walnut groves with fallen trees, perfect for galloping and jumping; narrow ledges above the river water, that worried my horses; gulleys and trenches, presenting eventing obstacles; river crossings with hidden quicksand and unseen depths that tested his intuition but refreshed his belly on a hot day. Riddle loved all conditions except the narrow ledge that went under railroad trestlework. He liked to dump me in the river water, shake me off when jumping a narrow gulley, and buck me off when cantering across logs. When I say that I "rode" horses, the statement gives the wrong impression. Actually, I spent most of my time falling off my horses and climbing back on. This amused everybody, including the horses and sometimes even me.

I enjoyed most the wild galloping and free jumping through the walnut grove. Riddle galloped with his whole heart. A horse's lungs work like a bellows. As the front legs extend themselves, they open the lungs like expanding a bellows and draw in air. When the front legs move drive back, they close the bellows, forcing oxygen into the blood system and expelling the depleted air. The faster the horse gallops, the more it reaches with its legs, the more air it draws into itself to power its motion. It generates the energy and strength it needs to run as it runs. A horse is a running machine. Whatever I asked of Riddle, he gave. I loved and admired him for that. As an asthmatic, I thrilled to ride an animal whose lungs functioned as they should. He raced through the long orchard aisles, not hesitating at the logs and fences, sensing his strides, and taking the jumps with assurance. He scrambled up hillsides so steep that I had to ride standing in my stirrups holding onto his mane with one hand and his neck with the other. When he worked hard, I could hear his breathing, not labored, but joyous. I could feel the expansion and contraction of his chest as he pumped air in and out. I could feel his courage press against his heart, challenging its muscles and chambers to match his will. Every part of this horse dedicated itself to propelling without limit his powerful body forward. Every part obeyed his dedication with faith. The courage of the horse is in running.