A beautiful little film

Were you aware that, in 1996, cocreator of South Park Trey Parker directed a film called For Goodness Sake on the subject of race in American life? Dennis Prager and Larry Elder host, and, though it’s rough around the edges, many of the vignettes – remember, this film was made when noted American Aboriginal Elizabeth Warren was still teaching Bankruptcy at Harvard Law School – are bitingly true today.

Watching this, and reading the comments on YouTube and in various places where it has been posted, suggests that the video resounds with what most people normal people believe about the left’s identity politics: that they represent a poisonous pill. Worth watching !

Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,
Letters from an American Farmer, 1782

You might also read Roger Kimball, typically excellent on this subject or, if I may borrow from a source of Roger’s, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who in The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), tells this story from the presidency of Jefferson, who is famously known as having said “[i]t does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

As Himmelfarb puts it:

On his way to church one Sunday, Jefferson was met by a friend.

“You going to church Mr. J. You do not believe a word in it.”

“Sir [Jefferson replied], no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir.”

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