Search This Blog

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Roots Of Modern Conservatism: Gingrich, Shelby, Rove, Bush, Et. Al.


Modern Conservatism betrayed its true nature to view at the incident at Hillsdale College, Michigan, where in 1999, Lissa Roche killed herself. She had been carrying on a 19 year affair with her father-in-law, George Roche III, the president of Hillsdale College.

...As one of his first acts as president, Roche brought in conservative author and icon Russell Kirk to teach at Hillsdale, but more importantly to give the world notice that Hillsdale was serious about being conservative. If Roche had been as serious about thinking as he was about fund-raising and public relations, he might have noticed that Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, specifically the chapters on Edmund Burke and John Adams, had some significant things to say about the relationship between reason and appetite, lessons that would have increasing relevance to Hillsdale College under George III’s increasingly autocratic leadership. That meant that Kirk also had something to say about the two strains within conservatism—the libertarian and the traditional—which appetite and reason represented...  
George Roche III was great, because he was a great fund raiser for the Conservative causes. He was lionized by Conservatives. However, you cannot keep up a 19 year affair without people becoming aware. In particular, you cannot commit so heinous an offense as George Roche did, year after year, without people becoming aware of it, yet to frightened to mention it.

Money was God, and the Republican Party had only One God. They looked the other way. Lissa Roche went out to the gazebo, a central place at Hillsdale, and killed herself.

The entire story is Death at the Gazebo:Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College by E. Michael Jones.

I am not aware where it is available at the present time. However, its importance is inversely proportional to the oblivion which modern society and media have banished it.

--

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds like many another "family values" Republican who's been caught in dalliances of various sorts. The one you relate here is particularly lurid.

Montag said...

Yes.
The most important question is why has this atrocity been forgotten?
It was just 10 years ago, and there was complicity of people on the local and national level, which points to the utter lack of morality within certain groups of people.

This was not just an individual tragedy; this was another icon of the age, showing us what we are: people who adore power and money and pay lip service to God.