Yes! A genuinely insightful column by Jonah Goldberg.

[mwb970]

Western Civilization and Other Fairy Tales
by Jonah Goldberg, townhall.com, February 6, 2008

(snip)

Families are civilization factories. They take children and install the necessary software, from what to expect from life to how to treat others. One hears a lot of platitudes about how children are "taught to hate." This is nonsense. Hating comes naturally to humans, and children are perfectly capable of learning to hate on their own. Indeed, everyone hates. The differences between good people and bad resides in what they hate, and why. And although schools and society can teach that, parents imprint it on their kids.

As a conservative, I'm a big believer in the importance of tradition, which writer G.K. Chesterton dubbed "democracy of the dead." But tradition can only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on. And so, when I read that 23 percent of British teens think Winston Churchill is no more real than Spider-Man, it makes me shudder at the voluntary amnesia of society, the wholesale abdication of parental responsibility that represents.

Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization an amazingly fragile thing, and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity. Indeed, someone once told me that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives. Of course, that joke's only funny if you've heard of Santayana in the first place.

Now, because even my daughter's minor joys are my greatest ones, I will gladly fork over large sums of money so she can dine with fairy-tale princesses. I will even play along. But she is only 4, and I'll only be pretending.

This is the first JG column I have actually enjoyed reading (and agreed with?!). It's even funny! If he would skip the "liberal Fascism" nonsense and write like this all the time, I might actually read him.

[Doctor_J]

1. I can't believe you read this stuff

:wtf:

[mwb970]

2. In fact, I normally skip Goldberg's columns...

...but there is that "know your enemy" thing.

Our paper here in Columbus runs his columns, which I usually just glance at without reading them. Almost every JG column can be summed up as "conservatives good, liberals bad". That's why this column, which doesn't even mention liberals and is on a non-political topic, took me by surprise. The fact that I agree with what he writes here made it all the stranger!

Worry not, my friend. I trust Jonah will be back to "normal" for his next column.

[BridgeTheGap]

3. You know the CIA/FBI, etc. read stuff they disagree with ALL THE TIME

I guess they must not really be on our side?