Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Letter from Anne Wortham

The Oprah Antidote
But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - what little there is left - for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.
In researching Anne Wortham I also found that she is a follower of Ayn Rand. That's why I haven't heard of her before. A black university professor who is a Rand fan?

Why bring her up? Because I've just come across a letter she wrote to her fellow Americans on November 6th of last year. I thought you might enjoy it ... so here goes: - Neal Boortz

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival - all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn't look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration - political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that "fairness" is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead - and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over - and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to - Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - what little there is left - for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

November 6, 2008

Perfect.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, this just says it all. My freedom came at a terrible price and the blacks and "progressives" have squandered that all for their self-aggrandizement. I will never forgive or forget them for that. I try to be tolerant but, my tolerance is really being tested by stupid, ignorant morons of many colors telling me they want change and they have hope. I hope that change does not kill us all.

Bolivar

ET said...

Update of Hamlet I iii 105-142

Polonius telling Ophelia not to fall for Hamlet's hot air

America: He hath, my lord, of late made many promises
Of his hope for America.

Uncle Sam: Hope and change? Feh! You sound like a groupie,
Screaming at an obscene hip wiggler at a rock concert.
Do you believe his promises of hope and change?

America:
I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

Uncle Sam: Silly twit! Enlighten you I shall. 'Tis moron you are,
Hearing his silky rhetoric as ways and means,
His toothy grinning. Think where go such schemes,
Having run their course in sundry lands,
Feeding parasites on the flesh of the rich.

America:
My lord, he hath importuned me with hope
In Harvard-like fashion.

Uncle Sam:
Ay, fashion you may call it. Get a grip, girl!

America:
And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord,
With almost all the holy vows of heaven

Uncle Sam: Ay, word traps to catch dreamers. I do know,
When conceit reigns, how prodigal the pride
Lends the tongue vows. These flashes, daughter,
Giving more light than heat, extinct in both
Even in their promise, as it is a-making,
You must not take for fire. From this time
Be something wiser in your racial guilt.
Set your patriotism at a higher rate
Than a mere wish to be cool. For the light Kenyan,
Believe so much in him, that he is young,
And with a darker agenda does he think
Than you might hear or see. In few, America,
Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers,
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits,
Breathing like sanctified and pious bonds,
The better to beguile. This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give time nor credence to smiling Marxists.
Look to't, I charge you. Do your duty.

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