Fireside Chat Ep. 165 — America the Fearful | Fireside Chat

Hello everybody, I'm Dennis Prager. This is Fireside Chat number 165. Hard for me to believe actually. You know they say time flies when you're having fun. Oh, by the way, of course, this is Otto. I will get a lot of hate mail if I don't mention. This is Otto, my sidekick. Oh, look at that. He's not always that responsive. Otto's terrific and he has his own clearly fan club, fans, socks. He's got more stuff than I do. I don't have socks. I don't, you know, I don't have any of the Otto paraphernalia. Anyway, welcome to it. They say that time flies when you're having fun. I was thinking about that because it really is amazing that this is the 100, 165th Fireside Chat and so I was thinking, well, time flies when you're having fun and I do enjoy this. But of course, the lockdown and the COVID have been awful and yet even in some ways the months of this past year have flown, which is very odd. But so this was not time flying when you're having fun. This was time flying when you're not having fun. Maybe time just flies. All right. Tempus Fugit, as they say in Latin. So welcome to the Fireside Chat. For those of you new to it, it is just a chance for me to talk to you completely spontaneously what's on my mind and then take your questions and see what's on your mind. Is he hyperventilating? Oh yeah, he's up. This is a rare treat, folks. Is he staring at the camera or just near it? Out, out. Okay, everything's okay, fella. You know, he dreams, by the way, a lot and it's a very, they're action-filled dreams. So we always wonder, is he like chasing a rabbit? Did he find a girlfriend? I never quite know what it is. All right. All right, Otto, you're the man. Okay, so I don't know if you've seen it. It's gone viral, this video on a United Airlines flight from Denver to Newark at the Denver airport. There was a family on board and they had in the family. He's loud today. Are we okay? Yeah, it won't be as loud. Oh, I see. Fine. Okay. Otto, you're too much. So on board, they had a two-year-old daughter among the family members. And like I suspect most two-year-olds, she did not want to wear a mask. I can only imagine it's a pretty scary thing for a two-year-old to have your breath controlled like that and your face covered. So she just would not have it on. They came over and they told them that a flight attendant came over and he told them that they will have to get off the plane if she won't wear a face mask. And indeed they were thrown off the plane. And I think about that and I can't tell you how I think it sort of represents a decline in this beloved country of mine. That if I had to show one video, well, it wouldn't be the only one. If I wanted to show what's happening to America, that would be one of the videos I would show. In other words, here, look at this and you'll understand what we mean. What people meant when they said make America great again, this is not an America that this would have happened. We lost in this country in 1958, 1968, there were very major viruses killing about 160,000 and in one case at about 225,000. The other obviously prorated to the population of America today. Nothing closed. People were not forced to wear masks on planes or anywhere else. Schools were open, stores were open. It's really worth analyzing why was there not the fear and panic in 58 and 68 that there was today. There was no quarantining because at that time nobody would have thought it rational or moral to lock down 99% of the country when less than 1% were being killed by a virus. 99% of the people, and of course, given the age discrepancy with people under 50, it's like 99.9% that are not affected in any serious way. They never would have thought of it. It was a different America. It was the land of the free and the home of the brave and the land of the wise and the land of the mature. People understood, people die. It is a tragedy. It is a tragedy if you die of a virus. Three times as many die, I believe, that's the number, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's twice as many, whatever, every year of heart disease. Why do we accept that? Because we understand that part of life is illness and you do what you can, and by the way, we should have done what we could, but we didn't. There is no doubt in my mind that the medical profession will be held guilty of mass death because of its condemnation of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which should be taken by everybody who has any signs of COVID. You take it early, the success rate in the studies with zinc, with zinc, with zinc, with zinc, have been incredibly high. Why the medical profession has, the CDC and others have said, don't use it for COVID, unless a person's in a hospital already, when it's often too late, is a crime. It is a moral crime, it is a medical crime, and we could have conquered this disease, in my opinion, with a massive use of these incredibly safe, half century or more old drugs, which parts of the world are so safe, they're over the counter. Anyway, all I want you to ask is, ask yourself, why in 58 and 68, with a great number of Americans dying, did nothing stop? Were children not deprived of their childhood? Children not deprived of friends? Children not deprived of school? Why then, and so different today? There are a lot of reasons for that. It's in my latest column, and I hope you'll read it. I've been writing a column for 20 years, and it comes out weekly, and I analyze this, so I'm not going to repeat everything that is in the column, but it is really worth asking, why was it so different? You know, in the national anthem, we have the land of the free and the home of the brave, because that's the way Americans all throughout their history saw themselves, as free and as brave. We are much less free and much less brave today. That's a terrible loss. We don't value either bravery or freedom nearly as much as they did even as recently as 1958 and 1968. You might have heard of Woodstock when about 100,000, I don't know how many, tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 young people gathered and danced and frolicked and made love and whatever they did, and that was right in the middle of a huge epidemic or pandemic. I don't know if it was a pandemic. I don't know if it was worldwide, and they weren't frightened. You know why are so many people frightened today? Because of the media. The media just frightens people, and the medical profession frightens people. We are a different society today. When you think about fear, I'll just give you one more idea. People are more afraid today not only of COVID, not only of dying, but of everything. Why are there safe spaces on college campuses? There were no safe spaces just 10 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. Why is there a safe space where you're given hot chocolate and Play-Doh and shown videos of kittens frolicking because somebody came to campus to give a talk that you don't agree with? So you go to a safe space because somebody came to the campus, specifically a conservative? Do you understand the infantilization of people, the induced fear? People fear other ideas, let alone COVID. It's a society built around fears. You'll die of COVID now, and you'll die of global warming in 12 years. It's one of the worst developments in American history. A scared people will not be a free people. That's why Land of the Free and Home of the Brave went together. Freedom and bravery are co-joined. You can't have one without the other. What people are afraid of, it's astonishing. So they threw a two-year-old off a plane. This is an embarrassment to me as an American, that they threw a two-year-old child off an airplane. By the way, the CDC on its website says, do not, capital N-O-T, that's their capital, their caps, do not put a mask on any child under two. So let's say this girl had her birthday last week. So a week before that, the CDC says, don't you dare put a mask on. Oh, but a week later, no mask, no fly. But of course, all the adults can take off their masks while they eat. We're living in the age of not only fear, but of irrationality. This is not science. This is magic. This is anti-science. This is irrationality. You know how many people get seriously ill from little children with COVID? Virtually none. Sweden kept its schools open through the whole year, and teachers did not get any sicker than anybody else. Why not? Why not? Because it's very hard, apparently, to get ill from a young person. It happens, everything happens. People die who wear seatbelts. But the rule is, seatbelts save lives. A two-year-old was kicked off an airplane for not wearing a mask. I would use that video to symbolize the decline of this country. I'm sorry to say, because I love it. Okie dokie, let's go to our question. And here we go. Take it away. Hey, Dennis Prager. My name is Kongman. I'm 23 years old, currently in Minneapolis, and I have a question about moral ontology. If the Bible is the standard from which we derive an objective moral code, how do we know which commandments are timeless and which ones are cultural apart from the contemporary understandings and exegesis of the text? If we're always learning more about the intent and context behind the scriptures, doesn't that essentially make morality that's rooted in scripture subjective to the times of the people interpreting the text? All right, you're clearly a thinker, I must say. How do we know which is timeless? You're right. Look, that's a great question. How do we know what's timeless and what is cultural or time-bound? So that is the reason that I have been working so many years on my commentary on the first five books, which I call the Torah. The Torah is the basis of Judaism and Christianity. No Torah, no Ten Commandments. No Torah, no God of creation. No Torah, no Judaism. No Torah, no Christianity. Everything is based on that. Love your neighbor as yourself in the Torah. Adam and Eve. Everything is rooted in those first five books, and I'm explaining them, including the toughest verses. Let me give you an example. So there's a law that says that if your child is a truly awful child, curses the parents, etc., etc., and in any other way that this was understood, you bring him to the court, the elders as it's called, and if he's found guilty, they execute him. So people look at that and they say, boy, that's primitive. Well, as I point out when I explained that law in the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible, it was actually one of the great steps forward, morally speaking. The genius of that law was it retained parental authority, but it did not allow the parents to harm their child. In virtually every society, parents owned their children. They could kill them if they thought it was proper to do so. To this day, in parts of the Muslim world, you have honor killings. That's exactly what it is. Parents killing a child, usually a daughter, not always, usually a daughter, because, for example, they feel that she had adopted Western ways, or she was dating a boy that they didn't approve of, and brought, quote-unquote, shame on the family. So the idea that you can kill your child was universal, virtually. And now comes this book 3,000 years ago and says, no, you can't kill your child, only a court can. But, of course, no court in history, no, in Jewish history, which is what matters here, ever killed a child. So the genius of the law was it took away the ability of parents to kill their child. That's where you have a timeless value. Nobody would assume that people today should take a child to a court and have the child executed. No court would do it anyway, and correctly so. But I want you to understand that that's a perfect example. There is a timeless message in a culturally bound law. It is my task in explaining this in the Rational Bible, that's the name of my work, why the value is timeless. What is the timeless value? Parents cannot kill their children. And the most important timeless is the Ten Commandments. They are truly timeless. If the world obeyed the Ten Commandments, the world would be beautiful. It would be the end of war, the end of murder, the end of theft, it would have ended slavery. The people who kept slaves or engaged in the slave trade, to be more precise, were violating Do Not Steal. Do Not Steal, which is the, let's see, 6th, 7th, 8th Commandment. Do Not Steal was first and foremost, do not steal a human being. How Christians or Jews who defended the slave trade did so is a puzzle to me. They obviously didn't care about the Ten Commandments or didn't believe that that applied. It is a timeless work. Okay, thank you for your question. We move on. Mohammed, 22, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Hello Dennis, how are you? I guess we have this in here because he's from Bangladesh, which is great. My dream is that people in every country watch this, because anything that I have to say, even if it's based on something that happened in America, is universally applicable. Most countries panic on COVID, not just the United States. Anyway, hello to you in Dhaka, and thank you for watching. How am I? I am asked that every day, about 15 times a day, because of my radio show. Because in America, instead of saying hello, people say, how are you? That's the way it is in American dialogue. How are you? Not hello. Anyway, I answer, I'm better than my country. I'm doing fine personally. But I am worried for the first time, truly worried, about the direction of America. If you could have people riot and not be arrested, that is a breakdown in civilization of the first degree, and obviously other things like kicking a two-year-old off an airplane. Rachel, 26, Chicago, Illinois. Hello, Mr. Prager, I'm a professional violist. Let me just tell you, I love the viola. I want you to know that. And for those of you who don't know, many of you do, I conduct orchestras periodically, I'm a very serious musician and lover of music, and I love the viola. It is a truly gorgeous instrument. But it's somewhat of an unsung hero, because there are almost no viola concertos compared to violin concertos. But anyway, the culture of the symphony that I am a part of is radically changing due to the BLM movement, Black Lives Matter, and dialogue between members of the orchestra have included statements like, I see no profound reason to play Bach, or these old dead white composers only speak to our upper-class white audience. Your statement, the left ruins everything it touches, is quite relevant here. How can we save the culture of classical music? How can we preserve its excellence? Well, you know who is preserving it? Non-Westerners. Non-whites. How's that? That's the joke. In Asia, classical music is doing spectacularly well in Korea and in Japan and in China. That's the irony, isn't it? They don't think of Beethoven and Bach as white, European white males. They think of them as the composers of the greatest, most heart-rending music ever written. That's because they are. Beethoven isn't great because he's white. Beethoven is great because he's great. It's a sick notion to care about the color of a composer. It's sick. But the left ruins everything it touches, not liberals. I always make a distinction. Liberals were great aficionados of Western civilization. But liberals are naive and they don't understand that the left will wreck everything that they love, including free speech and classical music. I am not optimistic about the future of classical music precisely for this reason. So mostly it's upper middle class, upper class whites going to your concerts. So you have a choice. Either you stop giving the concerts of this great music, then they'll stop going. So who do you think will go? What will you play instead? What great music will you substitute for Beethoven, Bach, and Haydn, and Schubert, Mozart? What will you substitute? The trick is not to get rid of the white audience. The trick is to teach classical music to people of every background. But we don't. Schools are too busy teaching about how racist America is and about preferred pronouns. And so they don't teach kids the glories of music. You don't destroy standards. You elevate people to the standards. That's what should be done. But if the orchestras go the way of the left, it is the end of the orchestras. Who's going to go? What will they listen to? And the amazing thing is, the left doesn't care. That's what's so amazing. Scott 30, Spartanburg, South Carolina. Mr. Prager, I have two questions, but I promise they're brief. One, what kind of wisdom can we gain from Otto? Let me think about that. I think the wisdom that can be gained from Otto is that with all the problems of life, you still have to enjoy it. And you still have to have an upbeat attitude. Or as I say, like the old Mad Magazine motto, what me worry? That's Otto's motto in life. What me worry? So when he lies down and starts snoring, my wife and I find it extremely relaxing. It's sort of like all is okay with the world. Number two, you are known for having a great speaking voice. It seems like many people don't enjoy hearing their voice played back to them. Do you share that sentiment? I do not enjoy hearing my voice played back. However, I'm sort of immune. I don't have any reaction, to be perfectly honest. So I'm ahead of most people in that way, because most people hate hearing their voices. I don't enjoy it, and I don't hate it. I'm very objective about myself anyway. When I hear myself speak, if somebody plays for me a part of a lecture, let's say, or I actually watch a lecture, sometimes I do because I want to see if I made the points that I wanted to make, like my University of Wyoming speech, which is on the internet, how socialism makes you selfish, makes people selfish. It's a very important thought. So what I do is I critique it the whole time, but I'm not at all preoccupied with the voice. I'm very blessed with a good voice. I admit it, a good speaking voice, not that I sing particularly well, but it is a gift, and I knew it at a very young age because in high school, I used to imitate announcers. In fact, I used to go to hockey games. I grew up in New York, so I'd go to New York Ranger hockey games every Sunday night that they played at home in New York at Madison Square Garden. So I'd go with my friend Mark Frank to these hockey games, and I would use my fist as if it were a microphone and announce the game for my friend Mark, who got a big kick out of it. So I knew at a pretty early age that it's something I like talking, but that I thought I knew how to do it, let's put it that way, and I was given the gift of a raw material. Everybody has gifts. I never engage in feel-good talk, so when I say to you, everyone has gifts, it is not to make you feel good. It is to state a truth. I have never met a person without some gifts. The trick is to know what they are and to use them if you can. Now, if you have a gift for math and you just don't enjoy math, then it was sort of wasted, but I don't blame you. You can't enjoy everything that you have a gift for. But I do suspect that if you have a gift for math, you'll probably enjoy it. I think that's the way it goes, that what we're gifted in, we do enjoy. But you need to know two things to build a better life. Your gifts and your anti-gifts. I don't know what word I would use for the non-gifts of life. Your flaws, how's that? Areas that you're just weaker in. I grew up with parents who made me keenly aware of my flaws, and it didn't feel good, but they made me a better and happier adult. They never just addressed my gifts. And the truth is, I don't even think they thought I had any in my younger years. This is not to knock them, but the gifts that I have don't come out when you're eight years of age. They don't come out when you're 11. They come out later. So I can't blame them. They just knew I wasn't a particularly good student. I got kicked out of class a lot because I talked during class. My father was called into school a lot because I used to beat up bullies, literally. I hated bullies, I still hate bullies. But I was bigger than everybody, so I could sort of beat up bullies. So they just knew, they thought I was very lazy. And to a certain extent, they were absolutely right. So I have fought laziness my whole life. That's one of the reasons I've accomplished a lot, is because I take on more and more projects. Because if I don't have the pressure of a project, I will just indulge in my hobbies. You have no idea how much time I could spend on my hobbies, just on audio equipment and listening to music. I could spend hours a day even reading about it. I get all these magazines about audio equipment. I go to audio shows. I love hobbies. I have a ball in life. As a friend of mine put it, he said, Dennis has more fun in an elevator than I do in a day. And he's right. Because I almost always joke around when there was a time when people were in elevators together. You might recall it if you're old enough. And so, look, I love life. I think it comes through. But you got to know your gifts and you got to know your flaws. This is a very important thing. You might want to make a list of it. Because I'm a big believer that you write down what you think, then you realize what your brain has in it. How do you know what your mind has in it if you don't see it on paper or on the computer screen? So, it's a very good project for you to do. What are my gifts and what are my flaws? And you might find it very hard to list either of them. That means you don't know yourself well. And that's a problem. You have to know yourself to move on in life. Sorry? Oh, we are. That's a great question. What can I do? I try to stop at 30 minutes. Because it's much better that you want more than that you turn this off. That's my view. So, anyway, Dennis Prager here, along with Otto, and the increasingly famous Megan. Thank you for being with us. This is the Fireside Chat, and I'll see you next week.