New York, N.Y. — “Ask not what you can do for yourself or your country but what your country must do for you.”

That’s the creed of today, Clarence Thomas worries, in a country of people who were once well-positioned to receive John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” At the time, ours was still a culture with “ears conditioned” to hear such calls to sacrifice and “hearts that did not resist it.”

It was a culture, Thomas said, that had an appreciation for “delayed gratification . . . something larger . . . perhaps something transcendent.” Children were raised with admonitions to “Learn to do without.” “Prepare for a rainy day.” And to know that “No one owes you anything.”

He aired his concerns for the future of the country he loves on Thursday night at a dinner on the upper East Side of Manhattan hosted by the Manhattan Institute. He spoke 17 years to the week after he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the United States Supreme Court.

As if to remind us of how hard and unfair the road to the Court can be — a topic on which Thomas is an indisputable expert — Thomas cited Robert H. Bork, who should be on the Court, extensively.

Justice Clarence Thomas — who is his Grandfather’s Son, as he told us in his remarkable memoir last year — is a “son of the south” who “was raised by a man who clung” to a love of freedom and independence.

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One wonders what Barack Obama — who has criticized those who “cling” to religion and the Second Amendment and other liberties — would think of Thomas and his grandfather.

One wonders, especially, what Obama would think of Justice Thomas’s emphasis Thursday night on the critical necessity of originalism — the only standard that works for judges, Thomas says. “We are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. We are just judges. Like the Wizard of Oz, we are mere mortals.” Thomas said there are only two ways to approach being a judge. The first: “To try to see as best we can the framers’ intentions.” The second: “Make it up.” Thomas concluded: “At least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and impartial.”

Yet in his debate with Senator John McCain on Wednesday night, also in New York, Obama said that he would look for those judges who have “an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.”