I’ll be back later this morning, but Penn Jillette speaks for me in this four minutes of genius.
“Ask what you can do for your country” is effing creepy and stupid. “Government that works” can suck it.
(h/t Mark Guppy)
Plausibly Undeniable
I’ll be back later this morning, but Penn Jillette speaks for me in this four minutes of genius.
“Ask what you can do for your country” is effing creepy and stupid. “Government that works” can suck it.
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I didn’t make it through Penn’s entire rant, but it seems he is mistaking the country for the government.
The temporary office holders in Washington are not “the country” they’re holders of a public trust, mere administrators of the greatest experiment of self governance in the history of the world. We put them there.
When my father was drafted into WW2 at the age of 31, he didn’t go to the Pacific to fight for Roosevelt, he represented and fought for his country.
It’s not politically correct to say it these days, but a little Nationalism and a touch of xenophobia are not necessarily bad mindsets.
I agree with Keith Johnson about Penn’s mistaking country for government, and I think we owe it to ourselves to do the best we can to ensure our government doesn’t turn us into a country we can’t live in. Of course, I see things getting so polarized now that it seems that for one set of individuals, a livable country is unliveable for another set and that we’re engaged in a battle of discourse in which The Other Side (regardless of the side one is on) tries to portary Our Side as one that is trying to take away from them instead of one that’s trying to preserve what Our Side has. But I digress.
I did listen to the entire thing and appreciated his distaste over the government telling us that not only should we serve but dictating whom we should serve. Whether, whom, what, and how much we choose to give or serve has become, instead of a matter of heart or conscience, a public measure of our worth for higher education, jobs, and party invitations.
By edict from on high (wherever that is) we not only serve, but we disclose and one-up over it; and there’s no value associated with serving our families or the little old lady from church who has just been moved from her lifetime home to a nursing home.
Penn’s critique of Obama quote, “It’s not the size of government that counts; it’s whether it works . . .” is right on the mark. The size of government does matter. The size of the government is indicative of the numerous ways in which the government has insinuated itself into our lives. Worse, far too many now feed from the government trough and have a vested interest in keeping it that way.