Miserablist History

Pastor, thank you for your thoughts. I too savour the intellectual dialog. This is one of the blessings of the Internet email.

I do not judge Michael Jackson as a person. I only leverage his media persona as a symbol. In fact, Jackson led a painful life because of his father's exploitation of his talents as a child.

As I likely have shared recently, I just finished Theodore Dalrypmple's The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism. In it he decries "miserablist" history in which the lefties today bash our countries as no good, only sources of evil.

He claims, rightly, that this victim drivel is really a racket to create make-believe jobs like affirmative action bureaucrats and gender study professors. You get the idea. As a result, as you observe, we have totally blotted out the great good that our countries have done.

In fact, and you are the first to hear this, during our stay here I have rekindled a deeper love for our country, because we are good people. We are not perfect people. But we are good people, and I cannot imagine the world without America as an engine for humane progress.

Yes, we need to restore proper balance to the teaching and understanding of where we have been as Americans, for to know where we want to go, we must know where we have been.

God bless.

Paul