By Kyle-Anne Shiver
Michael Walsh, aka David Kahane, has written a remarkable American classic which will help all us conservatives save America. If there were a literary equivalent of the Medal of Honor, this guy would surely get my vote.
As a longtime student of Alinsky myself, I was more curious than a lurking feline to see how Walsh answered Alinsky's manual for the left. Rules for Radical Conservatives far outshines Alinsky's drab socialist nihilism and actually not only gives conservative Americans a roadmap for bringing our nation back to Constitutional fidelity, but also tells us exactly how we got to such a place as this -- where truly limited government is little more than a dim memory.
But of course Walsh's book would be vibrant and colorful, where Alinsky's is nothing but stale adolescent peevishness in dun-colored verbiage. After all, Walsh is strong Irish-Catholic stock, whose father was a lifetime Marine, and Alinsky was just a dull-witted atheist with an absent father, whose mother was a harridan of the neighborhood. The voice of the shrew, Alinsky's mother, is as loud and off-putting in Rules for Radicals as the voice of God is fresh and alluring in Walsh's Rules for Radical Conservatives.
Alinsky took his material from neighborhood bullies who got the better of him throughout his childhood. He then moved up to getting lessons from thuggish big labor and the Capone gang in Chicago. Walsh, on the other hand, used the inimitable Christian giant, C.S. Lewis, and John Milton, of Paradise Lost brilliance, to conceive his all-American answer to Alinsky's luciferian treatise.
And as every good Sunday-schooler knows full well, one of the most glaring differences between those inspired by God and those inspired by the enemy, Satan, is a sense of humor. God is the author of humanity's sense of humor; Satan has absolutely none. Walsh is so divinely inspired that his book of rules is purely chock-full of laughs. I counted at least two side-splitters per paragraph in the conservative rules. And, dear readers who know me, understand that I am not the least bit prone to gratuitous side-splitting.
My favorite aspect of Walsh's conservative manual, however, was his genius use of the same literary device employed by C. S. Lewis in one of my all-time most cherished books, The Screwtape Letters. As nearly all Christian readers well remember, Lewis wrote his how-to-recognize-and-defeat-the-devil manual using the ingenious conception of the demon Wormwood. Wormwood's job was to infiltrate the mind and heart of a newly converted Christian and steal his soul back for the devil. Through a series of fictitious letters written by Wormwood to an "uncle" demon, the reader sees into the diabolical treachery of Satan and picks up amazingly useful knowledge on how to defeat God's adversary and never let his soul be threatened again.
In Walsh's work, this classic literary device has inspired the David Kahane muse, a cunning, lifelong, ultra-believing liberal willing to spill his guts on all the wiles, ways, and means of the nihilist left, just so conservatives will have a fighting chance to save the soul of America from the diabolical aims of the Alinskyites. In other words, if you loved The Screwtape Letters -- and who of good heart didn't? -- then you will find "Kahane's" manual a rip-roaring laugh a minute even as your spine shudders at the very real and imminent dangers we Americans now face.
When I spoke with the author, this week, I got a sense of a man with a full grasp of how we got to this wretched point in American history as well as a fully thought-out battle plan for our national survival. Walsh was a long-haired hippie, fully entrenched in the leftist academia brigade during his college years. A boomer like me, he too had temporarily bought into the sparkling veneer of socialism's kumbayah promise. But being of such hardy Irish-Catholic stock, Walsh quickly became un-mesmerized and reverted to the stuff of his upbringing by his staunchly conservative Marine father and traditional mom.
Walsh didn't do what many conservatives do, however. He didn't abandon his creative bent for a more practical and less liberal-entrenched field. Instead, he became a screenwriter and a novelist, and then a political commentator. All the while being surrounded on all sides by Alinskyites, he studied them, fought them on their own turf, discovered their weaknesses and their vanities, and finally exposed them with all their nihilist filth on the pages of Rules for Radical Conservatives.
Now, I would be remiss, dear readers, if I did not confide to you at least a few of my personal favorite tidbits from this remarkable field manual for rubbing the liberals' faces in the dirt of their own making. So, just to tease your fancies enough to persuade you to go out and buy this masterpiece of subterfuge, here are my most cherished David Kahane lines.
From the mouth of David Kahane, Walsh's liberal muse you'll love to hate, explaining the wiles of the left for conservative readers:
I want you to understand that when we say it's for your own good, we mean that it's for our own good. When we use a term like "social justice," what we really mean is that payback's a bitch ... When we start complaining that something is "unsustainable," we have not the slightest shred of evidence to support that assertion, and what we really mean is that it is, in fact, entirely sustainable, but that we are doing our best to wreck it ... When we speak of such things as "fierce moral urgency," our "morality" is based on absolutely nothing more than whatever suits our purposes, and bears only an accidental resemblance to anything found in such traditional sources of morality as churches and synagogues, or basic common decency.
Liberal muse David Kahane explaining the mindset of all dedicated liberals:
... my pals and I are the ones who run your neighborhood associations and co-op boards and "concerned citizens committees" - we never get tired of this stuff! - the people who meddle in every aspect of your lives, not only because we want to, having nothing better to do ourselves, but because we can. We are Eddie Haskell, on steroids, a malevolent, empowered Eddie Haskell, come to living, breathing life, and sent back to earth by a lower power to annoy you. ...
Muse Kahane takes his readers on a wild romp through the life and exploits of Madelyn Murray O'Hair, the "Presbyterian-turned-warrior-against-God," and lets us know in unvarnished truth how our once-orderly, fully functioning, prayerful schools were transformed to this:
Without wasting a lot of time invoking "God," we can devote more time and money to metal detectors, to self-esteem classes, to lectures from cops about the dangers of drugs and weapons. Instead of hectoring their "charges," as if there were some sort of inherent power imbalance between students and teachers, we now have teachers in our urban jungles cowering in fear from their "students," assaulted, beaten up, threatened. We have teachers' unions that can now devote themselves entirely to their real purpose, which is making sure that the teacher will never get fired (a small price to pay for having to endure the level of hostilities in the inner cities that a still-racist society engenders). With "God" no longer in the classroom, the old taboos have flown out the window along with discipline, morals, and learning. If you'd wanted to destroy the public schools in the U.S., you couldn't have found a better tip of the spear than Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
Well, dear readers, you get the gist, I'm certain. We are in one heap of liberal-made disaster from coast to coast and in every little corner of our society. But there is hope -- not in any political savior, but in God and in each one of us all-American warriors.
My favorite Kahane rule on how to talk to a liberal ("and you must!"):
Whenever confronted with some liberal jabberwocky, stated with a straight face and in complete seriousness, the ubiquitous conservative response must be:
You can't possibly mean that! You can't possibly mean that! (You idiot!)
And here is my parting advice to all who love this country and want to save her for our progeny:
You can't possibly live another day without this book! You can't! You just can't!
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
