The Clare Spark Blog

“Sugar” as depicted in the Mike Masnick blog

Here (below) is the astounding number of dogs in America. For those attentive to television advertising, dogs are the new love objects (for either sex), and earn the personal sacrifices once reserved for children: even old, feeble dogs warrant backbreaking devotion in a recent Aleve commercial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuhAKS6Ee0o, also the Subaru Love commercial: http://www.ispot.tv/ad/709i/subaru-impreza-make-a-dogs-day-song-by-willie-nelson). The stats suggest to me that I was correct to ask if we love our dogs more than our children, in my blog on depraved indifference to the fights over school choice. (https://clarespark.com/2015/07/14/depraved-indifference-to-education-reform/.)

http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/pet_overpopulation/facts/pet_ownership_statistics.html, and, http://www.statista.com/statistics/198100/dogs-in-the-united-states-since-2000/

I haven’t blogged in a while because I have been immersed in the lengthy, sometimes lascivious, biography of Henry Kissinger, as attempted by an inside dopester moderate man, Walter Isaacson (1992). (Isaacson is a celebrity himself, and featured interviews or memoirs with Kissinger’s famous former associates.)

HK as power behind the throne (Corbis photo in The Economist)

I have several responses to this mammoth, detailed, behind the scenes effort. The author has not the foggiest idea where the notion of “human rights” came from, incorrectly identifying them with Wilsonian internationalism, with its bogus “self-determination.” (For my own views see https://clarespark.com/2011/10/24/turning-points-in-the-ascentdecline-of-the-west/. I see the invention of the printing press as a key turning point making possible mass literacy.) And such internationalism was “idealistic” compared to Kissinger’s Realpolitik approach to foreign relations, which sought stability through European balance of power politics this author associates with Metternich, Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Bismarck.

Along the way, he also praises HK for brilliance, wit, and charm, but faults him for backbiting, malevolent gossip, and over-the-top ambition. I.e., HK is an uppity German Jew whose secret, previously hidden maneuvers fulfill the antisemitic stereotype, and proves the author to be properly assimilated, unlike his subject HK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Isaacson).

But there is more to be said about this book, which links the subjects in the title to this blog:

1. I was aware of the crises of the 1960s-1980s mostly as filtered through Pacifica radio, an outfit controlled by Stalinists and pitched to the counter-culture. I simply had no time as a mother of small and adolescent children to pore through contending published versions of the civil rights movement or the women’s movement, let alone US diplomacy regarding arms control, China, détente with the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, Chile, East Timor, Israel,  etc. –all subjects taken up in the Kissinger biography. Even my unique radio shows on the art world were irrelevant to the larger questions convulsing the world, and can be viewed as an extension of women’s work.
2. The behind the scenes diplomacy uncovered by Isaacson (minus its gratuitous digs at HK) suggests that no matter what publications we may scour for an accurate account of what our government is doing, all we have to participate in as citizens is partisan propaganda of one stripe or another.

Which brings me to my first and last question: “Is there life after birth”?

That query was prompted by the Fox News Channel obsession with Planned Parenthood and the alleged chopping up of “babies” by sinister forces (although the last video is alarming and the questions raise by the Right are reasonable).

I asked my Facebook friends what are our obligations to children as parents? One would guess that there would be dozens of responses, but it is “summertime and the living is easy.” So here are my own answers, in schematic form: we owe our living children attention to their developing brains, to their maximum health, to an education in hygiene and science, especially physiology, and above all, to critical awareness of the often confusing, even impenetrable, world outside the family, which they will have to navigate on their own someday without parental guidance.

We do not owe them messages that reinforce human weakness and deference to illegitimate authority. It will take the focused effort of all of us, old and young, to rebuild the civil society that has been snatched away from us by authoritarians of many stripes.