Mike Gallagher
8/29/2012
The Great Seal has got it all—everything liberals despise is there, front and center.
In the first place, you’ve got your eagle, holding arrows. What good could those arrows possibly serve, aside from celebrating the violent blood lust that liberals see in Americans? It doesn’t matter to them that in the eagle’s right talon he’s clutching the olive branch of peace—making the visual point that Teddy Roosevelt made 150 years later with the words “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Liberals don’t think we need those sharpened arrows.
Liberals would prefer it if the bald eagle on the Great Seal was holding olive branches in both talons, or, better, an olive branch in one, and maybe a soft cushion in the other, to entice our enemies to lie down and snooze.
Or, perhaps, the olive branch and a bottle of lavender massage oil. Or maybe one of those loofah sponges they use in spas.
Anything, actually, from the Brookstone catalogue would work.
The key, for liberals, would be to get rid of those awful arrows. We don’t need arrows, or a big stick. We just need a couple of Nerf toys and a pleasant, hopeful expression.
And that’s another thing that’s wrong with the Seal: that eagle looks too angry. Too hurtful and judgmental.
Liberals, given the choice, would replace the scary eagle with something more like the popular children’s television figure, Barney, the purple dinosaur. I love you! the Great Seal would project to all who gaze at it, a big purple dinosaur holding up a juice box and a gender nonspecific plush toy.
So now we’ve “fixed” the Great Seal of the United States. It’s no longer something liberals hate. It’s a happy, loving purple dinosaur, holding up a healthy snack and a soft cushion, and above his head is an ever-changing scrapbook of the Great American Victim.
But what about the most troublesome part of the Great Seal?
What about that awful motto?
E pluribus unum, Latin for “Out of many, one,” flutters on a banner around the eagles’—excuse me: around the purple dinosaur’s—head.
“Out of many, one” is the national motto, and what the Founders imagined it meant is that out of the great and celebrated differences between us, comes one nation and one larger purpose.
E pluribus unum is perhaps the most obnoxious motto the Founders could have come up with, as far as liberals are concerned. They don’t mind the e pluribus part—they love to note the things that divide and separate us. But they positively despise the unum part.
The truth is, the Founders anticipated this. When they gathered to form a nation, almost three centuries ago, they were a collection of very different men. The Puritans from the North had complicated and not totally friendly relations with the Quakers from Pennsylvania, who in turn pretty much hated the Virginia Cavaliers, who, for their part, viewed the Scotch-Irish Georgians and Carolinians with contempt.
They were different, in other words—pluribus kinds of guys—but they knew that if America was to succeed, it would have to find some way to get an unum out of all of that pluribus.
Liberals hate this. They hate any attempt to find common ground among Americans, because their political principles, and their political agenda, is all about dividing us, drawing distinctions, making lists of in groups and out groups, turning us all into victims or victimizers.
That’s the hot molten center of every liberal crackpot scheme—identify a victim group, apply political pressure, create a “program” to address the “wrong,” and confiscate money from the “victimizer” group to pay for it.
That’s the underlying tactic of the Obama administration in 2012; push the war on women, the war on the middle class, the war on gay people, and the war on Hispanics, and hope it will carry the day.
It is why liberals love to identify new racial and ethnic groups. That’s why they like to append a qualifier to the word “American.” It’s not enough to be just “American.” You’ve got to be an African- or Muslim- or Gay- or Asian- or Pacific Islander—or, really, any qualifier you like kind of American. You can’t be part of the unum, to a liberal. You always have to be a pluribus.
There was a story in the New York Times that showcased the absurdity of the pluribus crowd (aka the diversity nuts).
It was about a girl named Natasha Scott, who was described as a high school senior of mixed racial heritage from Beltsville, Maryland. She was venting about a personal dilemma on College Confidential, the go-to electronic bulletin board for anonymous conversation about admissions.
“I just realized that my race is something I have to think about,” she wrote, describing herself as having an Asian mother and a black father. “It pains me to say this, but putting down black might help my admissions chances and putting down Asian might hurt it.”
There you have it, from the mouth of a teenager, no less.
Look at what the pluribus crowd has done to this poor girl. She is acutely aware that the college admissions system favors one part of her ethnic heritage over another.
Oddly enough, Asians are a much smaller “minority” than African Americans in this country. But because Asians are so successful, college admission officers don’t feel sorry for them, so they are not a preferred “minority.”
What the pluribus crowd managed to accomplish with all of this ethnic engineering is not just to pit Natasha against other students in the quest for diversity.
They managed to pit Natasha against herself.
But the story got worse.
“My mother urges me to put down black, to use AA—Africa American—to get into the colleges I’m applying to,” Natasha confessed. “I sort of want to do this, but I’m wondering if this is morally right.”
Fantastic job, pluribus people! The only person with any common sense in the room is the child. She knows what she’s doing is wrong. It’s the adults who don’t.
That Natasha’s mom—herself an Asian—told her own daughter to check the African-American box is not just bad leadership; it is something much worse: It is cynicism incarnate.
Her mom is teaching her daughter to game the system and lie about her own ethnic heritage. Or at the very least, erase half of it to advance herself.
This flies in the face of everything our Founders tried to accomplish when they wrote the Constitution. Did they recognize that we’ve all got differences? Of course. But they also knew that the only way to move forward in freedom and prosperity was to dedicate the nation—the pluribus—to the unum.
The only way America works is if we act like America, instead of a squabbling group of distinct ethnic and racial subsets, which we are.
Contrast Gore’s talk with a speech in 2005 by Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a wonderful place where students are actually required to study the Constitution. Arnn was addressing the ways in which our Bill of Rights actually breeds harmony among Americans:
One may pray all he pleases, and others are left free to pray or not, and with all their property intact. Short of slander, libel, or treason, one may say what he pleases and do no harm to another. One can see how the right to property, properly conceived, has this same attribute. If my property is the fruit of my labor, and not of yours, then we have no conflict. My having my good deprives you of none of yours, and your having your good leaves me secure in mine. The interesting thing about this understanding of rights is the harmony it breeds in society. This harmony—or to use the political term, this justice—is the reason why our Constitution has lasted so long and our nation has prospered so well.Brilliant point, Dr. Arnn. Liberals love to talk the harmony talk, but our Founders walked the harmony walk. And “we the people” have been the beneficiaries.
So let’s go back to where we started all of this, shall we? We fixed the Seal—the eagle is now a purple dinosaur, the banners are now the Pantheon of the Downtrodden, the arrows are incense and a loofah sponge.
But the motto remains tricky.
E pluribus angry?E pluribus oppressed?
Or maybe it should be this: E pluribus omnipotent (government, not God)?
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