The young man said that’s fine, but that I should be aware of something important: that working in the trades will bring you face to face with “some of the foulest people you can imagine.” He said the idea of the noble blue-collar worker of ages past is largely a myth today. In his line of work, he said, he spends his day with men who have drug habits, are ex-cons (some of them), are pre-occupied with pornography, see women as whores, avoid child support payments, send a steady stream of filth out of their mouths, and so forth. He also said that some of them are decent all the same. The point, said the young man, is that if you are going to encourage your believing Christian child to take up the trades, you had better prepare them for the fact that they will be entering a world of degradation.
.. Without a doubt, though, I’ll take my place among the dysfunctional blue-collar culture than with the elitist progressive SJW culture. At least my coworkers respect me and don’t try to get me fired for not thinking like they do.
The Citizen-Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military
When he got to me, down at the end, he unloaded one of his more involved hypotheticals. “All right candidate. Say you think there’s an insurgent in a house and you call in air support, but then when you walk through the rubble there’s no insurgents, just this dead Iraqi civilian with his brains spilling out of his head, his legs still twitching and a little Iraqi kid at his side asking you why his father won’t get up. So. What are you going to tell that Iraqi kid?”
Amid all the playacting of OCS—screaming “Kill!” with every movement during training exercises, singing cadences about how tough we are, about how much we relish violence—this felt like a valuable corrective. In his own way, that Sergeant Instructor was trying to clue us in to something few people give enough thought to when they sign up: joining the Marine Corps isn’t just about exposing yourself to the trials and risks of combat—it’s also about exposing yourself to moral risk.
Resisting The Anti-Culture
Let’s face it: We now live in a world where refusing a man the right to expose himself in a woman’s toilet is enough to risk your city losing the right to host a football game.
.. The anti-culture warriors of this present age have very long, very strong arms and—unfortunately for the coming generations—very short sight. Just think of the Talibanic fury recently released on university campuses against any vestige of the past which does not conform to the exacting morality of the present.
Christians need to wake up to this. We have no culture to engage, let alone transform. It is thus time to drop the hip rhetoric of cultural engagement and transformation that comforts us that we are part of some non-existent dialogue and that grants the world of our opponents a dignity which it simply does not deserve.
.. He’s working from sociologist Philip Rieff’s definition of culture. For Rieff, any culture is defined by its “thou shalt nots” — that is, the things it forbids. This tells the people within a certain culture what is sacred and what is taboo. Culture is “a pattern of moral demands, a range of standard self-expectations about what we may and may not do, in the face of infinite possibilities.”
.. Modern Western culture is built on transgressing boundaries, on forbidding to forbid.
The center cannot hold because there is no center to be held.
.. Holding schoolchildren hostage to this perverse generation’s ideal of civil rights. Five years ago if you had said such an edict would come down from Washington, most people would not have believed it. Yet here we are.
.. Tomorrow it will mandate this in the public schools. And it will by no means stop there, not with this bunch, and certainly not with Hillary Clinton in the White House. It’s going to be one damn thing after another.
We no longer have a culture. We have chaos. And the people will accept it, because we have exchanged the culture we had for chaos, and we call it freedom.
I have never been the kind of conservative who thought of my government as a threat to me, my family, my faith, and my culture. That’s over.
.. It’s time to prepare for some very dark days. Those who still have a culture within them and their families and communities had better start digging in.
.. Whether Trump wins or loses, the Trump culture is ascendant. Whether in the person of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, we will get the President we deserve. The question is what next. Anyone who thinks that politics provides the primary answer to that question, is missing the larger reality.
Bill O’Reilly Defends Trump’s Vulgarity
Bernie Goldberg: Donald Trump said something that I can’t say on this channel––what he really meant when he talked about the size of a particular body part, because that would be vulgar. I can’t say it. But Donald Trump said it. And he’s running for president of the United States. And he didn’t only say it on national television. He said it during a presidential debate. Bill, I know you care about kids. You’ve talked about that a lot. Imagine if a family is watching this debate with their 12-year-old daughter and she asks, “What did he mean by that about size?” Is there anything––anything that would embarrass his supporters? Mainly his supporters on conservative television and radio who have fallen madly in love with Donald Trump, and who slobber over him in just the same way as liberals in the media slobbered over Barack Obama?
Bill O’Reilly: All right. I see it differently. I didn’t take offense by it. I think Trump is doing what he always does: appealing to regular people, playing off the Rubio thing, so if you’re gonna criticize Trump you’ve got to criticize Rubio. He did it first.
Goldberg: Do you realize what he said?
O’Reilly: Of course I realize what he said. But it was done in a jocular way.
Goldberg: But you couldn’t say it.
O’Reilly: Of course I wouldn’t say it. It’s not my style. But I know what he’s doing. And all of the gals and guys who support him chortled––word of the day––they chortled when he said it. I wasn’t particularly offended by that. But that’s okay. You and I disagree.
Goldberg: He’s running for president!
O’Reilly: But it’s a different era. It’s a different time. He’s running for president as a populist, not a Republican or a Democrat.
Goldberg: How come, how come you’re so concerned, as you rightly should be, about the coarsening of the culture? You always talk about that. And how crude and vulgar we’re getting. But you don’t care about this?
O’Reilly: I am. I told him––you saw what Trump said to me at the top of the program. I’m a negative guy now in his mind, all right? I probably won’t even get him to come in anymore because I have challenged him on his demeanor. All right, I have. But I’m fair. I didn’t think that was that big a deal.