Washington Crossing the Delaware

That's the 1851 painting by Emanuel Leutze.

I'm snagging the idea from Great Satan's Girlfriend, "Killing Our Enemies On Christmas Day Since 1776."

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered: yet we have this consolation with us -- that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Breathtaking New Photographs of WWII's Battle of the Bulge

Another great photo-spread from London's Daily Mail, "Vivid new Battle of the Bulge photos offer never-before-seen look at the war-weary soldiers braving the frigid weather as they fight off Nazi Germany's last major offensive of World War II." (Via Memeorandum.)

FDR Prolonged the Great Depression

From the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

Michelle Fields narrates:

RELATED: At The Other McCain, "‘F– Michelle Fields!’ — Interview With Reporter Harassed at Occupy DC Protest."

Red Hot Chili Peppers Inducted Into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

At Los Angeles Times, "Guns N' Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers among Rock Hall inductees."

The unfortunate thing is how many great artists aren't in the Hall of Fame. See "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees: Where's Rush, KISS?"

Retired Master Chief Yeoman Jim Taylor Honors Pearl Harbor Survivors

Well, with the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association announcing it will disband after December 31st, this year's anniversary seemed to have some final sense to it, like a part of our history receding a tiny bit from our reach.

PREVIOUSLY: "Fewer Veterans to Remember Pearl Harbor Day," and "70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Attack, December 7th, 1941."

Fewer Veterans to Remember Pearl Harbor Day

I never believed in all that "greatest generation" crap, but the WWII generation is our link to that history --- when the United States emerged as undisputed leader of the free world. As time goes by the war is relegated further to the past, and fewer folks will have direct memories to hand down to their loved ones. We'll have new traditions and new heroes, but some events are unique in their implications for American life and our political culture. Pearl Harbor is one of those events.

At New York Times, "Pearl Harbor Still a Day for the Ages, but a Memory Almost Gone":

HONOLULU — For more than half a century, members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered here every Dec. 7 to commemorate the attack by the Japanese that drew the United States into World War II. Others stayed closer to home for more intimate regional chapter ceremonies, sharing memories of a day they still remember in searing detail.

But no more. The 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack will be the last one marked by the survivors’ association. With a concession to the reality of time — of age, of deteriorating health and death — the association will disband on Dec. 31.

“We had no choice,” said William H. Eckel, 89, who was once the director of the Fourth Division of the survivors’ association, interviewed by telephone from Texas. “Wives and family members have been trying to keep it operating, but they just can’t do it. People are winding up in nursing homes and intensive care places.”

Harry R. Kerr, the director of the Southeast chapter, said there weren’t enough survivors left to keep the organization running. “We just ran out of gas, that’s what it amounted to,” he said from his home in Atlanta, after deciding not to come this year. “We felt we ran a good course for 70 years. Fought a good fight. We have no place to recruit people anymore: Dec. 7 only happened on one day in 1941.”

Continue reading.

70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Attack, December 7th, 1941

At USA Today, "Remembering Pearl Harbor, 70 years later." And the New York Times has a somber editorial, "Remembering Pearl Harbor."

Closer to home, at O.C. Register, "After 70 years, we honor Pearl Harbor heroes," and "Pearl Harbor casualties included O.C. men."

Bonus: A spectacular photo-essay at National Post, "Archival photos reveal horror of the Pearl Harbor on 70th anniversary of the attack."

Photos: Top, the attack on the USS Arizona. Bottom, the USS West Virginia burns (via Wikimedia Commons).

'An America Fast Vanishing, Often Overlooked and Sometimes Openly Despised'

See Fay Voshell, at American Thinker, "A Kentucky Funeral":

Glenn Roland Voshell was buried on a hill on his Kentucky farm last week.

"We can still do that here in Kentucky," his wife Gayle said.
And so my brother was laid to rest on the land he loved.

His Amish neighbors volunteered horses and wagons to carry him to his final destination. The horses chuffed and snorted as they plodded up the hill with their cargo of grandchildren, who momentarily had forgotten the reason for their ride up the hill. As all little ones do, they seized the moment, laughing with pure joy over an unexpected hayride.

We adults trudged in silence behind the wagon loaded with Glenn's body as a kindly sun warmed our shoulders, a soft breeze blew across our faces, and the vaulted blue sky looked down. The jingling of harness hardware and the soft thud of the horses' hooves were the only sounds. A hawk wheeled overhead.

Continuing, and then...

I reflected on how miraculous this gathering was. Here was community -- family, neighbors, and church folk all bonded by love and Christian faith.

Here, gathered at my brother's funeral, was an America fast vanishing, often overlooked and sometimes openly despised. Here were works of the hands, works of the plow, and works of faith. Simple things. Profound things. Things of the heart. Things my brother loved.

Here, too, I thought, was the heart of our country. If it were to stop beating forever, the land would perish.

God, I prayed, don't let the heart stop beating.

Read it all, at the link.

Who Killed Horatio Alger?

From Luigi Zingales, at City Journal:

The title character of Horatio Alger’s 1867 novel Ragged Dick is an illiterate New York bootblack who, bolstered by his optimism, honesty, industriousness, and desire to “grow up ’spectable,” raises himself into the middle class. Alger’s novels are frequently misunderstood as mere rags-to-riches tales. In fact, they recount their protagonists’ journeys from rags to respectability, celebrating American capitalism and suggesting that the American dream is within everyone’s reach. The novels were idealized, of course; even in America, virtue alone never guaranteed success, and American capitalism during Alger’s time was far from perfect. Nevertheless, the stories were close enough to the truth that they became bestsellers, while America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous. In a word, it was a meritocracy.

To this day, Americans are unusually supportive of meritocracy, and their support goes a long way toward explaining their embrace of American-style capitalism. According to one recent study, just 40 percent of Americans attribute higher incomes primarily to luck rather than hard work—compared with 54 percent of Germans, 66 percent of Danes, and 75 percent of Brazilians. But perception cannot survive for long when it is distant from reality, and recent trends seem to indicate that America is drifting away from its meritocratic ideals. If the drifting continues, the result could be a breakdown of popular support for free markets and the demise of America’s unique version of capitalism.

Continue reading.

RELATED: I dealt with some similar issues here: "Decline of American Exceptionalism?"

Dissing American Exceptionalism, Again

Another commentator, radical leftist Tom Engelhardt, misses the basic thesis of American exceptionalism. It's not all about power, which is how most of those who cheer American decline conceptualize it. See, "The American century: That was then":

As a 67-year-old, I grew up in a post-World War II era that, by any measure, was the height of the first American century. As much of the rest of the developed world struggled to rebuild devastated cities, the United States couldn't have been more exceptional, a one-of-a-kind country in producing the big-ticket items both of peace and of war, often from the same corporations.

Back then, there was no need for presidents or presidential candidates to get up and repetitively reassure the American people of just how exceptional we were. It was too obvious to state. After all, when you've really got it, you don't have to flaunt it.

So, the next time you hear any politician insisting that this country is American century-style exceptional, think of it as a kind of secret confession that we aren't. These days, you can feel the uncomfortably defensive snarl (or whine) that lurks in the insistence that our country isn't just another powerful nation in political gridlock and economic trouble.

Actually, we are, but Engelhardt's too much the bloody idiot --- surrounded by bloody communist idiots --- to understand why.

PREVIOUSLY: "Harvard's Stephen Walt: 'The Myth of American Exceptionalism'."

Schools Use Marijuana-Filled Occupy L.A. as Civics Lesson for Students

Great lesson in the Cannabis camp-out.

They might have better used the tea parties to educated students. Kids have little knowledge of the nation's founding, and there's a genuine historical tie between the tea party and American government. The radical left-wing anti-capitalist Jew-hating fests? Not so much. Or, well, not unless you're a communist organizer.

At Los Angeles Times, "Occupy L.A. offers a hands-on civics lesson for students, teachers":

Who says history has to be about dead men and a dreary assortment of dates and names?

For countless students and teachers, the Occupy L.A. encampment at City Hall has become a living classroom, a place to put a contemporary twist on topics such as the causes of the Great Depression and the limits of the 1st Amendment.

On a recent afternoon, students from at least three schools joined the colorful milieu of protesters — playing ball, posing with pet roosters and sounding off about corporate greed — to interview them about their aims.

Cleveland High School student Ryan Janowski, for instance, asked hard questions about whether the movement's leaderless structure would impede its progress.

Classmate Christopher Berry sniffed the aroma of marijuana and wondered whether a few "dignified leaders" might help protesters gain wider public acceptance.

The students are part of Cleveland's humanities magnet program, which is exploring class differences in America and comparing the Occupy movement with 19th century transcendentalism.

"It fits in with everything we're doing," said Rebecca Williams, an English literature teacher at the Reseda school. "It's a real-life movement — history in the making."

Right.

It all fits in. It's a real-life tune-in, turn-on, and burn-out movement. Freakin' commie loser dirtbags. I wouldn't send mine on the field trip. I'd take 'em myself and show them why America's schools are failing kids.

Community of Holocaust Survivors Dwindles in Queens

At New York Times, "A Community of Survivors Dwindles":

ONE thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own.

For Sophia Goldberg, change has meant the end of a way of life.

On a recent morning Ms. Goldberg sat in her tidy seventh-floor living room, surrounded by needlepoint portraits stitched by her own hands, and sighed over the changes immediately around her.

Ms. Goldberg, 98, lives in a 19-story apartment house in Flushing, Queens, one of two neighboring buildings that were erected for survivors of the Holocaust. When she moved there in 1978, she said, her neighbors formed a tight community of predominantly Jewish refugees like her who had fled to the United States from Austria or Germany.

“We had parties,” Ms. Goldberg said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We had card games. It was our people. We had Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in our apartment.”

Now, she said, “It’s completely changed — I have no neighbors here.”

For Ms. Goldberg, the transformation has been steady and overwhelming. Of the 326 residents in her building, now only 31 are Holocaust survivors, and only 7 of them are German or Austrian.

The new neighbors are friendly enough. But she said: “We do not talk. We say hello, goodbye. But that’s it. They don’t speak German. They don’t speak English. They speak Russian and Chinese. Sometimes they just shake their heads.”

Continue Reading.

The article links to Selfhelp Community Services, established in 1936 to help German émigrés flee Nazi persecution and settle in the United States. That generation is getting very old. No wonder Ms. Goldberg hasn't many friends around these days.

Early Thanksgiving Dinner

This wasn't as bountiful a spread as we usually lay out. My wife had to be at work at 2:00pm. She's an assistant store manager at a major national arts and crafts retailer. I'd mention the name, but it's not worth having my wife's life threatened by the likes of Walter James Casper III and his demonic progressive totalitarians.

She cooked turkey breast with mashed potatoes and gravy, green-bean casserole, stuffing and hot rolls. And there's cranberry on the side, of course. It was lovely.

And don't miss the Thanksgiving blogging at Maggie's Farm, "Why is American Thanksgiving about food?", and "Very Fitting For Thanksgiving."

Decline of American Exceptionalism?

Charles Blow, at the New York Times, draws the wrong conclusion from the recent report at Pew Research indicating that less than a majority of Americans (49 percent) agreed with the statement that "our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others." See, "Decline of American Exceptionalism":

Even if you put aside the somewhat loaded terminology of cultural superiority, Americans simply don’t seem to feel very positive about America at the moment....

We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism. We must answer the big questions. Was our nation’s greatness about having God or having grit? Is exceptionalism an anointing or an ethos? If the answers are grit and ethos, then we must work to recapture them. We must work our way out of these doldrums. We must learn our way out. We must innovate our way out.

We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices. You choose greatness; it doesn’t choose you.

And that means that we must invest in our future. We must invest in our crumbling infrastructure. We must invest in the industries of the future. We must invest in a generation of foundering and forgotten children. We must invest in education. Cut-and-grow is ruinous mythology.

We must look out at the world with clear eyes and sober minds and do the difficult work as we’ve done time and time again. That’s how a city shines upon a hill.

Blow's understanding of exceptionalism is not based in history, values, nor institutions. His view is in the things we do (like work hard to expand government and "invest" in the future) not what we stand for. He's a classic progressive that sees higher taxes and spending (for "infrastructure") as the means to buffing up that "City on the Hill" image. But Blow's meaning misconstrue's John Winthrop's famous sermon, where he evoked the Christian metaphor that the United States was a light unto the world. But not only that. Looking back over at that Pew study we see this data at the table embedded below. Part of our exceptionalism is the belief in individualism, that the individual is basis of the good society and that the political order is established to preserve individual liberties. Progressives continually downplay individualism in American exceptionalism because it conflicts with their big-government nanny-statism. Charles Blow wants to continue building the big nanny state. When he says we must "invest" in all those things he's really saying that we must spend more on the traditional progressive programs that are bankrupting the nation. But the way to invest again is the restore economic liberty and unleash individual potential and entrepreneurialism. To do otherwise will do nothing but turn us into a dependency society like all of the truly crumbling European states highlighted by the Pew data:

Via Astute Bloggers, "PEW POLL REVEALS CORE PROBLEM AFFLICTING THE WEST: MOST EUROPEANS NOW FAVOR A NANNY STATE."

GOP Tax Pledge Is Hurdle to Deficit-Reduction Deal — Or Is It?

At New York Times, "Economic Memo: Tax Pledge May Scuttle a Deal on Deficit."

It's a good piece. But I think the claim that the tax pledge is the main driver of GOP decision-making behavior is off base. Spending it out of control today in a way that is dramatically different from earlier eras. That's what Senator Jeff Sessions is talking about, for example: