The Day America Stopped Poncing Around

AFTER A week of watching the Democrats ponce around in the Denver Temple of O, Republicans couldn’t believe it when John McCain—who’s done his share of poncing around over the years—delivered up Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) as his running mate. As Nina May wrote:

Women were crying, men were high-fiving, everyone was hugging and celebrating because now... they had a ticket they could get behind[.]

Talk about “the one we’ve been waiting for!”

Look, Gov. Sarah Palin, (R-AK) is a politician, just like every other politician. She’s made her way by being good with words, good with people, and good at sticking in the knife at the opportune moment.

But you cannot accuse her of “poncing around.”

For you folks still a bit confused, here is the definition from the Urban Dictionary.

Poncing: Often used in the British phrases ’poncing about’ or ’poncing around’, indicating that a person is acting childishly, dangerously or not being serious about the activity at hand.

Nobody could say that Sarah Palin was poncing around when she resigned from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in order to go public with accusations of corruption. Nobody could say she was poncing around when she ran for governor against the Don Corleone of Alaska politics, Frank Murkowski, and won. Everybody knows what happens when you do stuff like that. You risk an immediate trip to the political graveyard, or maybe something worse.

That is what makes Sarah Palin nothing less than political kryptonite for the Democratic ticket. The life of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is a narrative of non-stop poncing around. His life begins with the embarrassing question: What was his mother, 18-year-old Ann Dunham, doing poncing around with a foreign student just off the boat? (We know the answer, of course. Liberal white girls back in the Sixties were guilt-tripped into demonstrating to the world how non-racist they were.)

Then we have the poncing around South Chicago as a “community organizer,” the poncing around for twenty years at Reverend Wright’s black racist church, the poncing around with a “search for identity” autobiography at the age of 33. We have the poncing around for years as chairman of Bill Ayers’ Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the poncing around in the Illinois State Senate with the lives of infants born alive.

But let’s be fair. Obama’s not the only one. There’s Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) who’s been poncing around in the US Senate for 35 years playing “Do you know who I am” when he wasn’t otherwise engaged taking the train home to Delaware and tag-teaming with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) for a couple of rounds of Borking.

And what do you call Sen. John McCain’s sponsorship of campaign finance “reform” and amnesty for illegal immigration?

The great social themes of the modern era, according to Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self, are equality, dignity, and creativity. Our liberal friends have had much of the running with these ideas with their vast schemes of government-sponsored equality, their top-down mandates to advance the dignity of diversity, and their radical cult of autonomous creativity.

But the conservative subculture has had rather a different notion on all this. In the conservative view these themes arise in organic fashion out of the affirmation of ordinary life—of work as a calling, of marriage and family as a covenant and a safety net, of creativity as a giving back to society.

Equality for conservative means that there is no table of ranks, that everyone can rise with talent and hard work. Dignity means that the production worker is just as worthy as the CEO, and the stay-at-home mother just as much as the career woman. Creativity celebrates the inventive spirit of democratic capitalism.

Our liberal friends define themselves in opposition to this organic conservative view, and they rank themselves on how completely their lives challenge the traditional affirmation of ordinary life. To them equality is achieved by affirmative action and Supreme Court ukases. Dignity is achieved by top-down diversity seminars and speech codes. Creativity is demonstrated not by Joseph Campbell’s hero returning sadder and wiser from the Hero’s Journey ready to serve his community, but by the anti-hero who stands against society in an act of creative defiance.

Measured against the manufactured identity of Barack Obama, the lifelong struggle against ordinary life of Hillary Clinton, and the blowhard triviality of Joe Biden you can see why Sarah Palin has electrified the conservative base.

In the conservative faith all good things arise out of the affirmation of ordinary life. You work hard, you support your family, you pitch in to help, and good things happen.

There is no poncing around, in other words. No time for it, either.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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