Described by a critic as “one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way,” “A Christmas Story,” directed by Bob Clark, debuted in 1983. Set in the 1940s, the film depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: The Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before the Nerf gun and “bang-bang you’re dead” were banned; family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,” and Christmas before Saint Nicholas was denounced for his whiteness, and “Merry Christmas” condemned for its exclusiveness.

If children could choose the family into which they were born, most would opt for the kind depicted in “A Christmas Story,” where mom is a happy homemaker, dad a devoted working stiff, and between them, they have zero repertoire of progressive psychobabble to rub together.

Although clearly adored, Ralphie is not encouraged to share his feelings at every turn. Nor is he, in the spirit of gender-neutral parenting, circa 2020, urged to act out like a girl if he’s feeling … girlie.

Instead, Ralphie is taught restraint and self-control. And horrors: The little boy even has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the “F” expletive. “My personal preference was for Lux,” reveals Ralphie, “but I found Palmolive had a nice piquant, after-dinner flavor—heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.” Ralphie is, of course, guilt-tripped with stories about starving Biafrans when he refuses to finish his food.

The parenting practiced so successfully by Mr. and Mrs. Parker fails every progressive commandment. By today’s standards, the delightful, un-precocious protagonist of “A Christmas Story” would be doomed to a lifetime on the therapist’s chaise lounge—and certainly to daily doses of Ritalin, as punishment for unbridled boyishness and daydreaming in class. Yet despite his therapeutically challenged upbringing, Ralphie is a happy little boy. For progressives—for whom it has long been axiomatic that the traditional family is the source of oppression for women and children—this is inexplicable.

Perhaps the first to have conflated the values of the bourgeois family with pathological authoritarianism was philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s formulations on authoritarianism have informed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In general, the consensus among these rights’ advocates has been that the traditional family’s hierarchical structure disempowers children. The solution: Let the State destabilize the parent-child relationship via policies that would define and limit the power of the parent, while increasing the power of child and political proxies.

While America’s founders intended for the family to be left untouched as “the major source of an orderly and free society”—Hillsdale College historian Allan Carlson’s words—politicians and jurists have decided to the contrary. What was once the economic and social backbone of American society has been inestimably weakened by both the welfare state and the Supreme Court—what with the latter’s redefinition of family and marriage, and the former’s incremental steps to trounce parents as the child’s primary socialization agent.

Culturally, the family has been demoted to what Charles Sykes once termed a “Therapeutic Family.” Having “adjusted itself to the new demands of the social contract with the Self,” wrote Sykes in A Nation of Victims, “the modern family has ceased to inculcate values.” Instead, it exists exclusively for the ostensible unleashing of “self-expression and creativity” in its members.

Progressives have triumphed. Very little remains of the unit that was once a vector for the transmission of values in American society. Women and children are less likely than ever to have to endure the confines of this bête noire of a family, with its typically “oppressed” mother, old-fashioned father and contained kids. Nowadays, women are more likely to be divorced, never married, or to bear children out of wedlock.

Unencumbered by marriage, women are also more prone to poverty, addictions and sexually transmitted diseases. Their children, a third of whom are being raised in households headed by a mother only, are paying the price in a greater propensity for poverty, and higher dropout, addiction and crime rates. Witness the black family. Having survived the perils of slavery, it was still intact until the 1930s, when the dead hand of the welfare state finished it off. As a social unit, the black American family is near extinct.

Contemporary America’s familial fragmentation—sky-high divorce rates and illegitimacy—has translated into juvenile crime, drug abuse and illiteracy. Yet despite all the State has done to “liberate” children from the strictures of the traditional family, ask any “emancipated” child and he’ll tell you: More than anything, he yearns for a mom and dad like Ralphie’s.

Indeed, lucky is the little boy who has such a family. Luckier still is the lad who has both such a family and … a BB gun.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
American Greatness
Dissident Mama
Quarterly Review
December 24

The post A Christmas Story Before Nerf Guns Became a No-No appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©2014 By ILANA MERCER 

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty, Quarterly Review,  Praag.org 

December 26, 2014

The post A Sad Christmas Story appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Open border fundamentalists seldom address devastating arguments against their case. Maybe they can’t. But they generally prefer to respond to philosophically limp positions. Immigration fetishists seem to like advancing positions not worth a straw.

The intellectually honest, however, will try to reply to a valid opposing argument, no matter who makes it. Unless he can’t. Then he must concede defeat. Alas, among the open-border claque, intellectual honesty is as scarce as unskilled labor is abundant across the land. The scrappy Tibor Machan is one exception. A scholar and a friend, Machan possesses the intellectual energy and honesty to address the hitherto unchallenged arguments I’ve put forward in opposition to mass immigration.

First some background. While he is no Tamar Jacoby (for one, he’s prettier), Tibor has expressed, in a column for the Orange County Register, doubts about the findings that, overall, immigrants cost taxpayers more than they contribute. Jacoby just denies facts such as those released by the National Academy of Sciences and relayed by the Heritage Foundation. Accordingly, “each immigrant without a high school degree will cost U.S. taxpayers, on average, $89,000 over the course of his or her lifetime.” Having tallied the number of illegal and legal low-skill, uneducated immigrants, the NAS has estimated that “in total, all immigrants without a high school education could impose a net cost on U.S. taxpayers of around one trillion dollars or more. If the cost of educating the immigrants’ children is included, that figure could reach two trillion dollars.”

It’s not clear why clever people consider these facts counterintuitive. The immigration “reforms” of the 1960s launched an era of egalitarian policies, which gave preference to Third World immigrants, who were then selected not for their skill or education, but for their family ties to a principal sponsor. Such a policy guaranteed the importation of masses of poor, less accomplished, dependent individuals. A finding to the contrary would be newsworthy.

Missing from the current debate about illegal immigration, argues Machan, is a recognition that “the welfare state is the underlying fundamental problem. Until that system is abolished, until a revolutionary change occurs and no Peter is looted for the sake of any Paul—whether poor, rich, legal or illegal—there will be no solution to the illegal immigration problem.” In the column “Welfare State and Illegal Immigration,” Tibor repeats an uncontested, standard libertarian stance: “the immorality begins not with putting illegal immigrants on the welfare rolls or transferring to them costly services at the expense of American citizens. The immorality lies in the welfare state itself, in the government’s policy of coercive wealth redistribution.”

The problem with so many libertarian formulations is that they do not respect reality. Rather, they hold up the libertarian ideal, lament its unattainablility, and refuse to debate the issue until the ideal is achieved. That’s intellectually lazy. It’s also an affront to reality, the rational man’s anchor.

And the reality is that the American welfare state is accreting, not shrinking. The reality is that the more libertarians support the importation of impoverished minorities, with a tradition of aggressively manipulating the political apparatus to obtain property not theirs—the more intractable the welfare state will become. How better to diminish property rights and accelerate wealth distribution and, with it, the death of the republic, than to add to the “union” each year the equivalent of a New Jersey, powered by identity-politics, and peopled predominantly by tax consumers seeking to indenture taxpayers? Witness how, when thousands of non-voting illegal aliens poured into the streets recently to demand their positive, man-manufactured, bogus rights, their elected officials and El Presidente (Bush) came up with a bill that would grant the protesters their wishes.

To the meat of my argument: From the fact that taxpayer-funded welfare for nationals is morally wrong, as Machan rightly avers, why does it follow that extending it to millions of unviable non-nationals is economically and morally negligible? Or that it remotely comports with the libertarian goal of curtailing government growth? How is this stock-in-trade, truncated argument different from positing that because a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits (welfare-dependent nationals), repelling or arresting the next (welfare-dependent non-nationals) is unnecessary because the damage has already been done?

This craven indifference to property proponents of mass immigration extend to the lives snuffed out in crimes committed by illegal aliens. Bob Clark, director of one of the most delightful films ever made, “A Christmas Story,” and his 24-year-old son were both killed by a drunk, unlicensed, allegedly illegal alien. Geraldo and Jacoby, the teletwits of amnesty, both asserted that the illegality of the perp is irrelevant to the crime. “It’s not an illegal alien story; it’s a drunk driving story,” Geraldo noodled on “The Factor.”

Geraldo was serious, although he should not be taken seriously. So here’s my next question: For the Geraldo/Jacoby crushingly stupid claim to stick, they would have to demonstrate that had this drunk, allegedly illegal alien been stopped at the border or been deported, his victims would have nevertheless suffered the same fate. If you leave the door to your home intentionally open (as Bush has), and advertise your hippie habits around the hood (as Bush does), can you honestly claim that the robbery, abduction, rape, or murder of your charges was unavoidable? (And that you are unimpeachable?)

I’ll let professor Machan do the work libertarians won’t do.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
June 15

The post The Work Open-Border Libertarians Won’t Do appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Set in the 1940s, the film, “A Christmas Story,” depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of nine-year-old Ralphie, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before “bang-bang you’re dead” was banned; family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,” and Christmas without the ACLU.

If children could choose their families, most would opt for the kind depicted in “A Christmas Story.” But they can’t. “Progressives” have consigned that middle-class family from hell to the dustbin of history. To them, it has long been axiomatic that the traditional family is the source of oppression for women and children.

Philosopher Theodor Adorno was perhaps the first to have helped conflate the values of the bourgeois family with pathological authoritarianism. Ralphie has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the “F” expletive. (“My personal preference was for Lux, but I found Palmolive had a nice piquant after-dinner flavor—heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness,” he reveals). He is also guilt-tripped with starving Biafrans when he won’t eat. Both these parenting techniques would fail every New Age psychological commandment. By today’s standards, Ralphie would be doomed to an emotional abyss.

The Adorno construct has also informed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Here too the consensus among rights advocates was that the traditional family’s authoritarian structure is oppressive to women and children. “The solution,” explains Cindy Silver of the Canadian Center for Renewal in Public Policy, “has been for the State to shift the balance in the parent-child relationship through policies that would define and limit the power of the parent while increasing the power of the child.”

“Progressives” can now relax: This bete noire of a family, with its “oppressed” mother, therapeutically challenged father, and contained kids has been reined in. The judicial trend of the state as parens patriae has seen the family usurped by the state as the primary socialization agent. Although the Founders intended for the family to be left untouched as “the major source of an orderly and free society,” says Dr. Allan Carlson, politicians have had other ideas. The Welfare State in conjunction with the Supreme Court’s radical interpretations as to what constitutes a family and marriage have dissolved what was once the economic and social backbone of American society. Consequently, contemporary America is a society plagued by familial fragmentation, sky-high divorce rates, illegitimacy, and the attendant delinquency—juvenile crime, drug abuse, and illiteracy.

Culturally, the family has metamorphosed into what Charles Sykes of “A Nation of Victims” terms the “Therapeutic Family.” Having “adjusted itself to the new demands of the social contract with the Self,” the modern family has ceased to inculcate values. Instead, it exists exclusively for the ostensible unleashing of “self-expression and creativity” in its members.

What remains of the unit that was once a vector for transmitting values in society cannot possibly pose a threat to its enemies. Women and children are less likely than ever to have to endure its confines. Women these days are more likely to be divorced, never married, or to bear children out of wedlock. Unencumbered by the “oppressive” effects of marriage, they are also more likely to be poor and to suffer from addictions and sexually transmitted diseases. Their children, a third of whom are being raised in households headed only by a mother, are paying the price of “emancipation.” They are more likely to live in poverty, and exhibit higher dropout, addiction and crime rates. Having survived the perils of slavery, the black family, in particular, was still going strong until the 1930s, when the Welfare State stepped in. The rest is history. As a social unit, the black American family is extinct.

The state has supplanted family autonomy and parental rights, and kids have paid the price. Yet despite what the state has done to nurture the “Hitler Youth” movement, children still place family above all else. In an exercise undertaken by Elections Canada some years back, an overwhelming number of them expressed a yearning for Ralphie’s family.

Lucky is the little boy who has such a family. Luckier still is the little boy who has both such a family and…a BB gun.

© 2005 By Ilana Mercer
    WorldNetDaily.com
    December 23

The post ‘A Christmas Story’: Snuffed By The State appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

One truth that has pride of place in the progressive pantheon is that the traditional family is a source of oppression for women and children. Paradoxically, women and children, however, are less likely than ever to have to endure the strictures of family. According to author Danielle Crittenden, women today are more likely to be divorced, never married, or to bear children out of wedlock.

Unencumbered by the oppressive effects of marriage, women are also more likely to be poor and to suffer from addictions and sexually transmitted diseases. And their children, a third of whom are being “raised in households headed only by a mother,” are paying the price for this emancipation. These children have higher dropout, addiction and crime rates and are more likely to live in poverty. Having survived the perils of slavery, the black family, in particular, was still going strong until the 1930s. Then the Welfare State took over and the rest is history. The black American family as a social unit has, to all intents and purposes, been decimated.

What remains of the unit that was once the transmitter of values in society cannot possibly pose a threat to its enemies. Depicted so delightfully in the film “A Christmas Story,” the traditional family has metamorphosed into what Charles Sykes calls the “Therapeutic Family.” Having “adjusted itself to the new demands of the social contract with the Self,” explains Sykes in A Nation of Victims, the modern family has ceased to inculcate values. Instead, it exists exclusively for the ostensible unleashing of “self-expression and creativity” in its members.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp., always a diligent underwriter of all forms of cohabitation that deviate from the traditional family, must have slipped up when it screened “A Christmas Story.” The film, set in the 1950s, depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of nine-year-old Ralphie, who, for the Christmas, yearns for that gift of all gifts, the BB gun.

Mother is a homemaker, father is a regular working stiff, and between them they have no repertoire of psychobabble to rub together. No one implores Ralphie to express his feelings, or engage in any form of abreaction. In fact, he is urged to show restraint and is disciplined when naughty. But he sure is not put on Ritalin for day dreaming in class, nor is he diverted into life skills and anger-management curricula when he gets into a fistfight. Despite the dearth of therapeutic comfort-speak in his life, Ralphie is a happy little boy.

Maybe the first to have helped conflate the values of the middle class bourgeois family with pathological authoritarianism was psychologist Theodor Adorno. Certainly, the literal punishment Ralphie receives for uttering the “F” word, and the ubiquitous reminders he gets of starving children when he refuses his food, fail every New Age psychological commandment. By today’s parenting standards, Ralphie would be doomed to an emotional abyss.

Progressives can rest assured: This bete noire of a family, with its oppressed mother, therapeutically-challenged father and firm discipline, is being reined in. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has trounced the Bill of Rights on issues of human rights, has deleted reference to the family. Coupled with the omission of any mention of the family, the Charter includes “age as a prohibited ground for discrimination.” With this, writes lawyer Cindy Silver of the Center for Renewal in Public Policy, the Charter “effectively changed the constitutional status of children to one of prima facie equality with adults.”

The legacy of the Adorno construct has been carried over into the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Here the consensus among rights advocates is that, due to its authoritarian structure, the traditional family is oppressive to women and children. “The solution,” explains Silver, “has been for the State to shift the balance in the parent-child relationship through policies that would define and limit the power of the parent while increasing the power of the child.”

Fulfilling the promise of “Hitler’s Youth” doesn’t seem to be at the top of the list for kids. Despite what the State has done to usurp family autonomy and parental rights, children still place family above all else, something that was self evident from the results of an exercise Elections Canada undertook in the public schools. Despite the attempt to inculcate them into the culture of state-enforced rights and entitlements, kids overwhelmingly expressed a preference for the traditional family.

If children could choose their families, most would opt for the kind of family depicted in “A Christmas Story.”

©2000 By ILANA MERCER
A version of this article was first published in The Calgary Herald
January 6

The post Modern Family Has Ceased to Instill Values appeared first on ILANA MERCER.