Favorite inventions and reality
 | Rob Crowe
Columnist
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One of my favorite jokes, at least one of the few I can remember, is one of where a person of a certain Nordic descent is asked what he considers to be the best invention of all time.
To this query he replies, “My thermos bottle. It keeps my hot things hot and it keeps my cold things cold, and, how do it know?”
I should not have been surprised a few months ago when a neighbor of mine whose family name was Toreseva, since changed (I presume) to protect the guilty, related to me one night a somewhat similar observation.
This retired educator, long a pillar of the community, was talking of the old days growing up in the Palisade area and said that the best invention of all time was the sealed beam headlight. His reasoning was that it made the job of venison procurement a whole lot easier for a kid supplying the neighborhood with that necessity in those days.
Evidently, before sealed beam headlights, the term “deer in the headlights”
didn’t have much meaning to those who lived in Palisade. I’ve not had any feedback from any other areas of the county so I’ll assume that’s as far as it went.
The area liberal fundamentalists also get very inventive as they go through their contortions of trying to get you to believe that white is black. One wants you to believe that Osama Bin Ladin is not the terrorist, the United States is the terrorist. I haven’t been able to totally follow this, but it goes something like this: a C-SPAN caller called and a Russian student was denied a visa and a German student was required to sign a paper and Israel occupies Palestine and Hersh says the Marines dropped many bombs and Bush prayed so the U.S. is the terrorist. Chilling.
Another appears blinded by his own ideological propaganda when he implies that President Bush led the nation to war under false pretenses. This particular writer fails to mention that the Congress, Democrats included, spoke nearly exactly the same words as the president when approving action against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Another inventive, unsubstantiated accusation that the administration participated in ideological corruption of federal agencies is laughable. What is the president elected for if not to steer the direction of the executive branch?
Another inventor would have you think that President Bush is spying on you. Now, I’ve heard this charge before and yes, President Bush has authorized select monitoring of conversations between known terrorists and persons within the United States. This happens to be well within his authority as president. In fact, if he is not doing it, I would consider it dereliction of duty. An overwhelming majority of Americans polled approve of his handling of this situation.
For perspective, look to OpinionJournal.com, where Mark Steyn says: “The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West. One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care … government paternity leave ... We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity – ‘Go forth and multiply,’ because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.”
His well-written article goes on to point out that with the accelerated birth rates of the Muslim nations and the non-sustaining birth rates of the EU nations, Europe will become largely Muslim through immigration and the reproduction rates of those immigrants before long.
The harsh reality is that to sustain our civilization we must pay attention to the things that matter. Inventing pseudo-issues only causes us to become like the proverbial “deer in the headlights,” fiddling while Rome burns.
Rob Crowe chairs the Aitkin County Republicans and raises kids and cows on a farm near Hill City.
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