Gaius Julius Caesar is assassinated in the Roman Senate
Upon deliberating and formulating in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a mechanism of governance for the ages, Benjamin Franklin left Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Stopped on the steps by a well wisher, he was asked about the outcome of the secretive deliberations. “Well Doctor, what have we got? A Republic or a Monarchy?” The circumspect Franklin thoughtfully responded, “A Republic….If you can keep it.”
Benjamin Franklin was fully aware of the fragile tenets upon which self governance, the rarest of human societal structures through history, rested. Having the opportunity to develop a republic from scratch after a providential victory over the strongest military on earth, Franklin was under no illusions as to the longevity of such an undertaking if the baser human emotions took over from the agreed upon foundations of a democratically led governance.
Yet, the republic has indeed stood for 228 years from the day the Constitution became law, and the world’s oldest continuous democracy took root. Its careful balance of the rights of citizens and the limitation of government, protected by an innate understanding as to the role of free speech in the form of civil discourse and the rule of law as represented as blind to bias, linked inextricably to objective truth, has led to the exalted position of the United States as a beacon of freedom and stability so many years from birth.
Now we sit at a time where the hubris about the gift of self rule is equally matched by the ignorance of the role each individual must play in the maintenance of the compact that preserves a healthy, functioning republic. Examples abound. The congress is back to building laws in secret to avoid the difficulties an open forum of discussion provides. The president is back to accomplishing changes by diktat. The deep state leaks to subvert the elected will of the people, to harass and damage those that would upset the applecart. Free speech is considered a weapon that risks upsetting entrenched interests that have re-imagined the American story into one of victim groups and predators. Elections are to be manipulated to make sure the accepted side wins. Justice is imbued with the mission to reorder law through interpretation, not to find justice in the objective truth. The press has become an arm of propaganda, seeing events in the shades of pre-ordained opinions and prejudices, turning facts on edge and subverting measured thought and appropriate rationalizations. Reason has been trampled by emotion, and violence as an acceptable alternative to any compromise.
The events of the past week, where a premeditated attempt to assassinate multiple representatives of congress because of their political philosophy, couldn’t maintain a first page position in any news outlet for more than 24 hours shows how far we have fallen in our understanding of the threat every day to this most fragile of gifts, self governance. We are in danger of losing Franklin’s republic, and the people who are pushing it over the edge are ignorant of what they would have lost, and arrogant in their ignorance of what would transpire if they get their way.
The self righteous senators who convinced themselves that by assassinating Julius Caesar they were preserving their position as the elite representatives of Roman society, found themselves instead to have permanently destroyed the republic that had given them their exalted position. By killing their Caesar, they brought upon themselves a hundred more.
It is proving progressively hard to guard the ramparts of a civilization that has presumed itself unworthy of guarding. Et tu?
Venezuela : Socialist Utopia begins the inevitable process of turning on its own photo attrib: Christian Veron Reuters
In 1921, the brutal Russian Revolution originally born in 1917, first, to overthrow the Czarist rule and subsequently, the nidus of a social democratic structure, was coming to a climax. The Red Army, infused with the radicalist furor of the Bolsheviks, had nearly completely eradicated the White Army, a loose collection of monarchists, non-bolshevik democrats, and militarists that stood as a viable option to the installation of a utopian manifesto facing the ever suffering Russian people. Like all Socialist ‘dream-states’, the Revolution was predicated in convincing the mass of people of the coming egalitarian utopia, and ignoring the means of creation, a top down elite dominance over a servile proletariat, demanded of all utopian structures. Two organized groups began to realize their view points, as part of their cooperation with the overlords in the Bolshevik structure, were no longer valued. Faced by the severe consequences of communist rigidity in the economy, the soldiers, sailors and citizens that had taken up the mantle of revolution, now asked the revolution to respect their needs. A rebellion against the overlords ensued, called the Kronstadt Rebellion. The millions of peasants of Ukraine, the breadbasket of the developing Soviet structure, objected to the forced requisition of foodstuffs without any return or support of local needs. The response from above was ruthless; the peasant response was to defend themselves against the theft of their labors, by forming the Green Army. The result of asking for the egalitarian provision of the resources and bounty of the state as outlined in the Marxian manifesto? The total crushing of both groups to secure the dominance of the overlords. The Revolution eats its own last, but inevitably.
The one hundred years since the revolution on Marxist ideals first succeeded on the planet have been littered with the same reality of socialism deviating from its theoretic idealized form, over and over and over. The recruitment of the poor and dispossessed by leaders proclaiming a utopia denied by a capitalist elite. The progressive recruitment of the nation’s resources and power into the hands of a few elite who claim a special objectivity and principled character that allows them to make the crucial decisions for the masses. The hero worship idealizing the leaders that permit like minded elitists in other country to exult upon their idealism, and ignore their minder’s corruption. The eventual collapse of the agreed upon interactions that maintain civilized human behavior. The collapse of the compact between the governed and the governing – and the inevitable brutal clash where only one societal construct can remain standing — the oppressors or the oppressed.
From Russia to China, Laos to Cambodia, North Korea to Uganda, and Cuba to , now, Venezuela – the socialist revolution eventually eats its own. the saddest stupidity in the never ending tragedy of injecting the ideal socialism of academic treatises into the real life consequences of human society, is that elites of the world continue to observe its successive failure as an example of the lack of purity of commitment and the nefarious undermining of individuals seeking “advantage” over others. Never mind the millions of murdered, starved, imprisoned, and oppressed in the gulags of the Soviet State, the death camps of Cambodia, the starvation of the Korean masses, the slaughter of the Chinese middle class by the Red Guard.
Now, the world turns it’s lonely eyes to Venezuela. The emerald country of South America sits upon the world’s largest oil reserves, a bottomless piggy bank to fund any conceivable socialist agenda for its 31 million citizens. With the nationalization of the oil industry, Hugo Chavez secured the financial means of building the infra-structure lionized in socialist lore. “Free” health clinics and hospitals. Universal education. Planned economy. Expansion of government direction into every societal and individual decision. The oil piggy bank also filled the coffers of the elite — making millionaires out beholden military leaders and judges, and billionaires out of the Chavez family. the Chavez mystique was imprinted everywhere in Venezuela – the ‘fatherly” advice for his children, the Venezuelan poor, on television talk shows, the posters extolling his far sightedness in schools and buildings across the country. For a while, the socialist ideal was artificially propped up.
The world’s leftist elites, enthralled with yet again another potential example of the superiority of marxist principles (they themselves would never accept the yolk of), flocked to this newest latest savior from capitalist reality. The “charismatic” Chavez – socialist dictators always have to be “charismatic” to excuse their totalitarian instincts (as in the “charismatic” Castro or “charismatic” Mugabe) — unfortunately did not count upon the great equalizer. cancer, that would abort his life time appointment to lead his nation’s socialist revolution. At the occasion of his funeral, the celebrity elites opined upon his ‘great father’ role for Venezuela. Michael Moore – “Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous”. Sean Penn – “I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chávez and the people of Venezuela. Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president Maduro.” Oliver Stone – “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place. Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chávez will live forever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”
The great father Chavez in death turned the whole cabal into the hands of Nicholas Maduro, who made sure to continue the unique brand of hero worship, corrupt oligarchy, and the permanent stoking of the resentment of the poorer classes. Unfortunately, the conversion of a difficult to control diverse economy into one 93% driven by oil and petroleum product receipts, reached its nadir with the collapse of oil prices, in 2014. The United States had discovered fracking, and suddenly the OPEC countries faced the sullen reality of capitalist competition. In Venezuela, there was not enough money left to bribe all the officials, subdue the black market, and provide for essential goods. Inflation destroyed people’s meagre savings, and essential goods — food stuffs, medicines, even petrol — dried up. The not so charismatic Maduro packed the court and attempted to shut down the Assembly, jailed his opposition, paid off more aggressively the military, even began to form para-military fascist groups — the colectivo — to harass and cower the population.
As Venezuela must endure its inevitable collapse throwing off the socialist yoke, and its equally painful rebirth, the elites of the world, particularly the profound hypocrites that live in free market and free expression societies, will of course avert their eyes. They will revert to lambasting their own bountiful providence, and work toward the socialist virus infesting itself deeper into the American host. When Maduro falls and the country is adrift with parasitic warlords like Libya, or an even more terrible junta takes his place, the leftist elites will sigh, and look for the next carcass.
If only Chavez had been a little more pure, a little more stalwart….too bad. It appears Venezuela wasn’t a worthy dream-state after all.
A Doolittle Raider Mitchell B-25B bomber leaves the deck of the USS Hornet April 18, 1942
In the lead plane, the fuselage visibly shook as two massive engines strained against the restraints, driving rpms sufficient to create the escape velocity needed to lift the fuel and munition laden bomber across and safely off the short 500 feet of flight deck available to them on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. In the co-pilot seat sat Richard Cole, a 27 year old Army Air Corps pilot picked by his squadron leader Lt. Colonel James Doolittle, who likely gave him a brief nod in the noisy cockpit as the time to accept history was upon them. No real time for nerves. 15 bombers and 75 crewmen behind them, waiting restlessly for them to clear. Waiting since December 7th, 1941, to show the Empire of Japan the United States was wrong country to pick a fight with.
After the catastrophic surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States and allied powers were reeling from a well supplied and well trained imperial Japanese force trained in the most modern equipment and imbedded with the most ancient martial ardor. Ruthless and efficient, the Japanese spiraled into the South China Sea imperiling the Philippines, with a tendril of American force clinging to Corregidor. The strategic thinkers in Tokyo strove to convince the Americans and British that their destiny in resistance was in ignominious defeat, and they convinced themselves and their population that the battle would be fought on foreign lands away from the sacred homeland.
The Americans had their own psychology to worry about. The greatest economic force in the world was well over a year away from adequate force projections against such a difficult foe, and it was not clear how long the American public would be able to tolerate defeat after defeat. The goal after Pearl Harbor by American strategists was to eliminate the aura of Japanese invulnerability, and crack the fantasy of superior racial will and capacity for sacrifice for the Emperor. The Japanese had shocked the Americans with a complex and massive multi carrier strike across 3000 miles of ocean destroying a large part of the American navy at Pearl Harbor. How could the Americans now with no functioning battleships, and 4 overstretched carriers possibly achieve a similar psychological blow? The answer was divined By Lt. Colonel James Doolittle who almost immediately after Pearl Harbor envisioned a means of carrier projection that would strike the Japanese homeland itself and achieve an equally stunning psychological impact. The crazy idea was not to risk the few carriers the Americans had in a suicidal mission involving fighters and dive bombers with short flight capability that would require the carriers to enter Japanese waters and almost certain overwhelming defenses. No, the crazy idea was to do something everyone thought essentially impossible, to use the carriers from longer distances and launch heavy bombers that would strike the mainland of Japan and have sufficient fuel capacity to continue to China, and land…. Crazy.
Doolittle, a test pilot and engineer, first proved on land he could take off on an extremely short runway on land then proved it on a carrier. The mission would require bombers to fly as much as 2400 nautical miles to complete the mission, but nothing mattered if the fully armed planes could not even get off a flight deck. With modifications, Doolittle had found his plane, the Mitchell B 25B midrange bomber, and in the three months since Pearl Harbor sufficiently modified it to achieve the concept of the mission. President Roosevelt, willing to try anything to gain a foothold with the American public in a sea of bad news, approved the mission, and the meticulous process of picking crews that were willing to try something never done before on a one way mission with no direct home of return was left to Doolittle. 80 men eventually formed Doolittle’s 17th bomber squadron, and on the second of April left the Alameda Naval Station loaded on the USS Hornet for the long trek across the Pacific.
The plan was to get sufficiently close to Japan to allow the fuel necessary to safely land in China, but on the morning of the 18th of April, the task force was spotted by a Japanese scout ship, and Doolittle and the Hornet captain, Mark Kitscher, determined to launch the bombers given the loss of the element of surprise, despite being a full 10 hours earlier and 170 nautical miles further out than planned. The Hornet was turned into the wind. Doolittle piloting the lead plane, and the 15 bombers behind Doolittle and Cole then accomplished the impossible in 40 minutes, all successfully launching a munitions laden bomber from a carrier flight deck, though none of them had ever done it before, or would do it again. Flying low to evade detection, over six hours of nerve wrenched flying were required to reach the target, Tokyo, but the insane nature of the attempt contributed to the Japanese complete surprise, and the bombers rose to 1500 feet and managed to strike the heart of the Japanese empire, Tokyo with over 2000 pounds of incendiary bombs each. The physical damage was relatively minimal, but the psychological damage to the Japanese was immense. It was clear that America had determined that the pain of war would be felt on the Japanese mainland from the war’s very start, and an ominous hint of what was to come, entered the Japanese psyche.
The brief glory of the successful raid rapidly turned to desperation for the flight crews as their realized the increased distance required to fly by the early launch had stolen their fuel reserves. Some managed to reach the Chinese mainland into the hands of allied forces, but others had to ditch into the sea, and one crew was force to abandon their plane on Russian soil. Of the original 80, 69 escaped capture or drowning, 3 were killed in action, and 3 others were eventually executed by vengeful Japanese forces. Doolittle and Cole were among the 69 to return, and were among the pilots would fight again, and contribute to the eventual massive air destruction of the Axis powers. Doolittle would receive the Medal of Honor and military immortality, and Cole the Distinguished Flying Cross and the pride of a job well done.
Which brings us to Richard Cole, the co-pilot of Doolittle’s lead plane on the Tokyo raid, who stood at 101 years of age on April 18th 2017, the last survivor of the those heroic airmen who 75 years ago achieved the first blow against Japan in a mission so impossible no ever tried it again. Every year after the war to celebrate their accomplishment, the men of the 17th bomber squadron would get together on the anniversary and toast their fallen comrades. A stand filled with upright goblets, upon which each goblet was etched with the name of a surviving raider, was placed in the room, and as time took crew members, each was toasted with cognac, and the goblets of the fallen were successively overturned. With each decade the numbers of upright goblets grew fewer and fewer, and the group’s mortality was etched for all time when Doolittle’s goblet was turned over in a toast to their fallen leader in 1993. By 2016, there were just two left, Cole and 94 year old David Thatcher, and on June 22, 2016, Richard Cole was the last man standing. On April 18th, 2017, the final goblet remains upright, and it has become Richard Cole’s destiny, to be the Last Raider standing.
The men and women of the magnificent generation that braved all to save the world from a dark, soulless future are rapidly leaving us forever. They are now only faint memories in faded photographs, flickering newsreels, and history books. But everything they were, they always will be, as they faced true madness and through heroic sacrifice and personal will, gave us all one more chance at a better world. To all the World War II veterans, from Richard Cole, to my own father, God Bless you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.
The Obama Presidency 2008-2016 photo — national review
Every election of a new President of the United States brings a quirky American tradition to the forefront — the need to rate or rank the President about to leave office against his predecessors in some hastily assessed scale of accomplishment and gravitas. The academicians and faux historians love doing it, because it implies they themselves alone have sufficient stature and authority to summarily adjudicate recent history and immediately weigh it against distant history. Additionally, they can make sure their version of success or failure, their definition of consequential, will set the standard by which their favorites are judged. The current President Obama, as he prepares to leave office, is already being rated “highly,” as if they would possibly let objective insight get in the way of their feelings for the man of hope and change.
History of course is its own best guide, as distance and events begin to provide better perspective to the actions and inactions of the President, that determine if the country and the world were left a better place and important arcs of history were affected downstream.
President Obama is doing his utmost to try to self define his Presidency as transcendent, because that was standard he set for himself at the moment of his election in 2008.
Transcendent Presidents are few, as their capabilities and depth of awareness of the forces of history, and the collective and progressive openness of the people to their message must additionally be transcendent. President Obama’s message, for good or ill, was transcendent, the transformation of the United States as a world leader and defendant of individual freedom, into a more passive collaborator in globalist ideas, and a country that needed constant and consuming racial and societal reflection at home to achieve a society “worthy” of its out of proportion bounty. This was a President that wanted to be transcendent, consequential, and to the elites that righteously demand a world they alone can admire, he was the perfect talent for the job of societal transcendence.
Some Presidents have left quietly and allowed others to reflect on their time in office, others have suggested their own sense in a few chosen words, the challenges of their time and their hope for the country. President Obama felt the need to restate his place in history through an hour long, rambling speech that tried to stay ahead of the sickening feeling in his political gut, that the country did not see his consequentialness consistent with his own opinion. If you have been told over and over again by the fawning elite and your own ego, that you are the unique answer to the nation’s yearnings, it is, I’m sure, a very uncomfortable feeling to see the country rapidly averting its eyes to your vision.
Hope and change in the end did not feel consequential to the country’s needs and yearnings, and in many ways the fall from grace has been stark and total. In the period of the President’s ‘transcendent’ leadership, the party reflecting his views has gone from a position of dominance, to the loss of majority in the state legislatures, governorships, house of representatives, senate, the presidency, and soon, supreme court. The President’s personal charm did not translate into an aura of leadership that anyone was willing to follow. He achieved essentially one legislative victory, the Accountable Care Act, that took on his persona and became extricably linked as Obamacare, a veneer of “progress” in healthcare that rapidly collapsed under the weight of its poor depth of structure and lack of alignment with the average person’s needs. Its overwhelming inconsequentiality will be forever defined by the law being overturned literally as its namesake is replaced. This inconsequential President, unwilling to seek consensus with others on so consequential a concept as overhaul of the nation’s health delivery system, will be consigned to leave office with his singular achievement leaving the stage alongside him.
President Obama, elected as the literal answer to the prayers of millions who believed in Martin Luther King’s dream of a society based not on the color of one’s skin but the content of one’s character, had an incredible opportunity to bring this message to final transcendence. Maybe more than any other President, his unique characteristics offered the ultimate bully pulpit to cement a new racially advanced society, to the benefit of all. It was most disappointingly in this arena, where his talents and leadership proved most difficient and ham handed. The eight years of Obama showed a steady deterioration in inter-race relations, with ‘victories’ claimed through the championing of victimhood and political correctness, and the profound indifference to urban violence, police relationships, and cycles of family demise and neighborhood opportunity. The final twin daggers to the President’s tone deaf, failed recognition of his own role to educate and to lead were both stark, and frustratingly familiar to previous events. The first was the awful reverse racist event of four black youths torturing a mentally disabled white youth and proudly broadcasting it on Facebook, and the President unable to articulate any principle of race that would speak to the universal concepts of civilized decency and respect whatever the direction of racial ignorance. The second was the President removing the protection of Cubans escaping the totalitarian, oppressive government of Cuba and requiring return to Cuba of those without appropriate documents. This move is a fit of pique to hamstring the next administration, and to support a legacy event of restoring relations with communist Cuba. The ruling pretends to support legitimate immigration processes, when for eight years administration has allowed porous borders and sanctuary cities to shield many individuals who sought to do America and its citizens great harm, yet treat them as equals of Cuba’s oppressed and desperate escapees.
Finally, Obama’s foreign policy of retrenchment from a perceived American expansionism left the country far more vulnerable, and the world infinitely more unstable. A radical transformation of the nation’s focus from international human adversaries, to an attempted quixotic war on the world’s core temperature, left America and the world progressively detached from the President’s effort to be a transcendent world leader. The superficiality of the vision without the hard work of philosophical development and the backbone to assure adversary respect led leaders to ignore “redlines” and “sanctions” when they realized Obama’s reaction would be inconsequential, his attention easily diverted to personal rather than national goals. Pathetic attempts to use his supposed personal and rhetorical gifts to re-direct Russia, mollify the Muslim world, and influence elections in Britain and Israel collapsed upon the emptiness of his leadership. The unfortunate result for all the planet is that the country that must lead for a stable world to exist, has been led by the most inconsequential of leaders on the foreign stage. It is not clear if the wake of such inconsequence will be the darker consequence of upheaval, but history would suggest the outcomes of such failures are determined in the eventual collapse of rational actions by aggressor nations.
The many other examples, the regulatory waterboarding of American enterprise, the weakening of the military, the enormous deficit spending and ballooning of debt assure the need for consequential actions of subsequent Presidents to address the distracted dithering of the current one. Consequential Presidents set in to place forces that assure decades of shared purpose regardless of politics due to the overwhelming reality of the positive impact of those consequential decisions on society. There are no examples of consequential leaders where the very lack of their presence on the stage led to a rapid and complete overhaul of everything they had directed, and a society satisfied to see it happen. For consequential presidents, the historical consensus can often turn to epic recognition. For this President for whom so much was felt possible, it looks like his inconsequence will result in the legacy of – 15 minutes of fame.
The Revolutionary Icon of the Collective – Fidel Castro 1959
Fidel Castro, the scourge of the United States and the people of Cuba for nearly sixty years left the stage of history last night at age 90. The response of the world was predictable. Those that saw him as a romantic revolutionary figure who “stood up” to the oligarchs and brought “equality” to Cuba eulogized him as a unique and transformative leader. Those that saw him as a dictator who sought singular power and nearly brought the world to nuclear war, saw his death as overdue and good riddance. For the Cubans who had suffered under his oppressive rule and managed to escape his grasp the emotions were more direct and less philosophical – it was spontaneous celebration in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana.
The twentieth century was full of despots whose propagandistic manipulation of mass media brought them impressive cover for their dark and vicious suppression of those who might obstruct their total control. The slaughter of innocents and opponents was often sublimated by a press enthralled with the trappings of revolutionary rhetoric. The New York Times, consumed with the energy and zeal of rallies they observed in Germany, on November 22. 1922 reported on an emerging radical named Adolph Hitler :
“Several reliable, well informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism is not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”
The use of mass rallies, uniforms, poster art, and movies to express the enthusiasm of the collective, caught left leaning investigative reporters into reporting the narrative, rather than totality of the cost of such collective impulses upon individuals. The violence and enforced directives regardless of the human toll were looked upon as a necessary side product of any desired collective societal change to overcome the obstruction of the “less enlightened”. The Berkeley Daily Gazette January 1, 1931, caught in the glow of Stalin’s ruthless but, in their mind, necessary transformation of Russia into a Soviet State, reported:
“The Soviet Union can look upon a year of enormous achievements in the direction of industrial expansion and collectivization. Translated into human terms, it means that the economic ways for the 160,000,000 were fundamentally changed. At the same time it was a year of costly sacrifices, sharpened internal conflict, food shortages, and political pressure.”
Fidel Castro had learned all the appropriate lessons of the tyrants before him. Socialism, to succeed in attaining complete power, must always have a youthful, revolutionary, and collective face that implies an inspirational and idealistic message of equality that will mask the reality of stolen freedom and failed collective economic production. He rode into Havana in 1959 a uniformed revolutionary, armed to defend the revolution, and never took his uniform costume off in public for decades. Parades and armies followed, patterned after the “citizen” brigades of the the French Revolution’s Jacobins and later the Directive, exporting Cuba’s revolutionary zealotry eventually into Latin America and southern Africa. Offspring like Sandinista Brigades of Nicaraguan Daniel Ortega and the beret wearing soldier for socialism Venezuelan Hugo Chavez attempted to export the Castro melding of militarism for the cause and distracting pageantry with some propagandistic success but similar economic destruction.
For all these despots, the literal truth for their people of economic collapse and massive oppression of individual freedoms in the name of collectivist victories of so called “universal” healthcare and education. The result each and every time was the accumulation of massive quantities of wealth in the hands of a very few, and the economic calamity to the masses, hidden behind a ruthless “protection” of the revolution behind a military and secret police domination. The socialist heroes Castro and Chavez became billionaires, their generals millionaires, living in exclusive enclaves, while their people struggled for existence. In each case, “liberal” celebrities jockeyed to have their picture taken with the dictators, to connect with the “juice” of revolution and laud the “equality”, only to retreat to their own mansions and private planes supported by their own success in their own “unjust” society.
And always, the crushing of individual incentive, personal liberties and freedoms, the destruction of families, the starvation of the culture beneath the artificial global message of “social justice”. Despite the clamp down by left leaning media sublimating objectivity for the “truth” as they wanted to believe present, the real truth always managed to bleed out. In Castro’s case, it was the non-stop incredibly dangerous whatever the odds exodus of his people across the Florida Straits to the beacon of individual freedom they perceived the United States to be.
Cubans flee Castro’s Cuba across the Florida Straits
The collectivists will always be enthralled with those who are willing to be ruthless for the “greater good”. Socialism hates the individual, who keeps getting in the way of the equality of the greater good, sold in propagandistic and pseudo-religious overtones, such as ‘global warming’ and ‘social justice’. Individual expression is a dangerous weapon for “other”, that exists to reinforce the inequality of innovation, creativity, and success that are seen as non-progressive.
The finality of death is unfortunately often the only weapon to remove these dictators from the money and idolatry that supports their nonsensical economics and totalitarian hold on their people.Mortality offers the one universal weapon of the oppressed that sometimes gives them the crack of weakness necessary to overthrow the rickety dictatorial structures of the overlords and restore a nation’s humanity.As so often in the past, there is nothing about these dictator’s staying on history’s stage way past their welcome that is worth celebrating in the least.
The President elect put it most succinctly for all of humanity that has suffered under the Castros of the world. Fidel Castro is dead!
If only we could believe the collective oppression that has stood in the way of humanity for the past 110 years might be on the way across the River Styx with Fidel. Good riddance indeed.
Postscript: To understand what Castro and his ilk created in Cuba, read City Journal reporter Michael Totten’s “The Last Communist City”. Its worth your time to the last word.
2016 U.S. Presidential Election Donald Trump 306 Hillary Clinton 232electoral mapwikipedia
At 1:31 AM on November 9th, 2016, the impossible became possible, and the possible became reality when the Associated Press declared on the basis of projected results Donald J. Trump as the winner of the election for 45th President of the United States of America. The stunned establishment media, pundits, professional pollsters and bicoastal elites that had assumed their version of history was irresistible and unstoppable, were speechless. Trump, derided throughout the election process as a misogynist nincompoop with a cult following of racists, deniers and loony birds, faced the universal prediction of a comfortable win for the establishment candidate Clinton, that despite all her faults, clearly would dominate the incompetent Trump when the American people entered the voting booth and faced the two alternative futures.
The American people entered the voting booth, faced the two alternative futures, chose Trump and never looked back.
I have taken several days to digest what just happened, and face up to my own journey regarding this election. For a conservative like myself, I have dreamt of the magical moment when I could wake up the day after the election and contemplate the following conservative American electoral revolution. A Republican House. A Republican Senate. 33 of 50 states run by Republican Governors. 31 of 50 state legislatures are fully controlled by Republicans. And… The President of the United States is the Republican candidate……Donald Trump. Wait….Donald Trump?!?
The last part, as unexpected as the extent of the revolution, was of course the part I had struggled to contemplate for months. I looked initially to Rick Perry of Texas. Then Marco Rubio of Florida. When it came down to two, Ted Cruz. Anything to protect the principles of classical conservatism I had spent my adult life educating myself upon and looking for candidates who saw the answers to the world’s problems as I did. Limited, effective government. Personal freedom. Protection of happiness and opportunity for all. There was no place in my universe for emotional populism and nativist appeals. Trump was the poster child for just such appeals. He threatened to build a wall between America and Mexico against all reality. He threatened to throw out all undocumented immigrants, than let them back in. He threatened to throw out all trade treaties, install nineteenth century tariffs. He stated President Bush’s mistake was not only going into Iraq, but not confiscating their oil. He recommended the withdrawal of the United States from NATO, the allowance of Russia to absorb sovereign Ukraine. A supporter of Democrats all his life, he promoted “infrastructure spending” on a massive scale, and declared sacred all entitlements against any attempt at reform. On a personal level, he attacked everything that moved against him. Bush was “low energy”. Fiorina was “ugly” Rubio was “little”. Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted”. And in the end game, “Crooked Hillary”. He egged on many of the darker elements of American society to see immigrants as “other” and stood back as lewdness and crudeness poured out of such dead-enders onto the other candidates through social media.
Not exactly a dream candidate. It is however critical to recognize that it is likely no other candidate other than Donald J Trump could have brought about the November 8, 2016 revolution. Try as I might, I can not imagine any of the other Republican hopefuls standing up so courageously under the withering barrage of the establishment media that had crushed so many others, and giving it back more than he got, to spectacular effect. I can see no other candidate focusing like a laser beam on the flaws of Clinton as a candidate, and not giving an inch, until the entire world saw her for what she was. I can’t conceive of any other candidate ignoring political operatives and managers who relied on mechanized,sterile get out the vote campaigns, trusting instead the motivation and enthusiasm of the masses he saw so clearly in ever larger mass rallies, held in the outback of America the establishment had ignored for years. In retrospect, Donald Trump was THE unique force of nature to pull off one of the greatest upsets in American electoral history.
There were obviously other realities in the perfect storm that produced a President Trump and the republican wave election. His opponent, Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party, were the perfect foils, and profound contributors, to just such an outcome.
The revenge of the “Deplorables”:
In mid-September, the normally careful Clinton made the gaffe of the election when she stated, “half of Trump’s supporters belong in a basket of deplorables.” Her insulated audience laughed and applauded. Of course they did. Democrats had for decades derided massive quantities of Americans as “fly over country”, “rubes”, and to quote the current President, “bitter clingers”. When these rubes defended their liberty to see marriage or abortion as a religious philosophy, they were harried. When they stood up for the Second Amendment, they were castigated as accepting mass murder. If they defended family values or showed concern regarding the societal fractures and flaunting of government preferential treatment to non-citizens over citizens, they were denounced as racists. If they complained that they were concerned about government delivered health insurance, they were told to pass it to see what’s in it – the designers of Obamacare stated the insurance was passed in such a way “to fool the stupid people.” The result were massive premiums, huge deductibles, and loss of insurance for hundreds of thousands of the “stupid people”. This massive swath of the American electorate decided to form the famous coalition that President Nixon so famously called the “Silent Majority”, and crush Clinton in the “fly over” vote.
The Disappearance of the Vote Machine:
Hillary Clinton developed a massive war chest and huge ground operation to do what President Obama had managed to do in the previous two elections, turn on the Democrat vote machine. Sickly, and lacking the personal stamina to physically drive enthusiasm, she relied on traditional voting turnout processes that would replicate the overwhelming numbers in the patchwork coalition Obama had built: urban votes driven by democrat political machines and unions, female and minority votes driven by perceived grievance and fear of exclusion from a place at the decision table, and young idealistic voters pushing societal redesign. Her lack of personal charisma drove a dramatic imbalance between the negative of voting to prevent an outcome and the positive of a projecting a better world. The result? Although it appears Trump will equal Romney’s 2016 popular vote, Hillary Clinton will fall nearly 7 million votes behind Obama’s 2008 voting turnout. Having been provided nothing by Hillary Clinton to vote for, they just stayed home.
It’s The Corruption, Stupid:
In 1992, the male Clinton candidate for President, Bill, famously recognized the underlying gorilla in the room, the anemic economy, as the insurmountable reality the first President Bush would not be able to overcome. The Clinton war room made sure they never overlooked this fact, pasting the sign “It’s the Economy, Stupid” on the wall. In 2016, failed female candidate Clinton after the election pathetically blamed her loss on FBI Director Comey’s letter two weeks before the election announcing the reopening of the Clinton email investigation due to new findings. Clinton felt the re-opening of the investigation lost her the election. It wasn’t the letter. It was the Corruption Itself, Stupid. Clinton’s brutal abuse of the law regarding the maintenance of a private server for government business, exposed high level security information to foreign government hacking, in order to cover up the even larger scandal of ‘pay for play’ of the Clinton Foundation selling US government influence for millions and millions of dollars of personal Clinton profit. This was cynically followed by the willful State and Justice Departments’ coverup of destroyed documents, producing nonsensical immunity agreements to keep the most culpable quiet, highlighting the fundamental corruption of having one standard for regular americans, another standard for the elite, rife throughout American government. The voting American had seen it again and again. Sanctuary cities. The marauding IRS targeting conservative Americans. The environmental nazis flying private jets burning massive quantities of oil, to devise treaties to lambast normal americans heating their houses or driving their cars with oil. A Culture of Corruption so vast, that Clinton merely was the pathetic, greedy poster child. It was the Corruption Stupid, and the chant that took over the last days of the election was – “Drain the Swamp.”
Americans are Patriots:
It may be that the average American can not recite the document that contains the fundamental differentiator of American identity, “Life,Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, but they feel it in their gut. For too long, the meme had been America is evil, America has abused others, America is in inevitable decline. The Democrat Party had progressively positioned itself as the defender of personal emotions, over societal success. Americans recognize the uniqueness of the American experiment, and want to pass on the hopes and opportunities to their children and grandchildren. They wanted someone who could articulate this, hoping first it was President Obama with “Hope and Change”, but soon recognized this was predicated upon giving up the American Dream of a life well lived. This sense of American patriotism wasn’t building empires or rigging the system to the “victim” of the moment, it was a positive belief that being American focused most on hard work and fair play winning the day. Hillary Clinton promised more of the same sagging of the American spirit. More victimhood, more collosal government oversight and hegemony. Like the Brexiters in Britain, the voters in America were not yet willing to undergo an enforced setting of the sun without a fight.
On November 8th, I went into the booth for the first time in my life truly questioning what I would do. In the isolation of the voting booth, I thought about all the things I previously believed were important in a President. Deft understanding of foreign affairs to avoid mistakes in a dangerous world. Respect for the American Constitution and what it uniquely protects for every individual in the nation. A life time of respect for the rule of law and equal justice for all. A clear understanding of fair play and respect for people of differing views. A life of public service to understand the complicated world of compromise and values.
I thought about the country and the path it was on. I thought about how I have defended the ramparts of civilization as the means to a better world. I thought about who was willing to go to the mat for the country and its people.
In the end, I did my job as a citizen, and pulled the lever. The lever for Donald J. Trump. I don’t know if he can help make America great again, but I at least know he has not already decided America should never again be great. I may regret selecting the neophyte over the known quantity, but like 62 million of Americans, I decided I’m willing to risk seeing if he can learn on the job.
The election is over and the hard work now begins.
As a curious postnote, it turns out that the most clairvoyant political pundit, the person who saw America more clearly than any Washington DC pundit, was someone as unexpected as the candidate Trump who pulled off the electoral miracle.
This Guy:
Kurt Cobain -Lead singer of the rock grunge band , Nirvana
We are ten days away from an epically unpleasant choice for the presidency of the United States between two candidates who show genetically ingrained layers of sleaze in their makeup heretofore not seen. The virtue of entering a polling booth, completing by decisive vote an extended period of consideration as to who can best effect a positive future for the nation, a privilege not universally held in this world still populated with tyrants, is truly absent to us this year. Instead, we will have to wallow in the mire adherent to both candidates covering our own virtue with shame, or opt out, and passively accept the decision of those who wallow better. Do we select the candidate who has lived a life bereft of principles, of shady deals, broken contracts, meandering ethics and political loyalties, history of cheating and uncouth,abusive behavior? Or do we select the candidate who has epitomized self-aggrandizement, character assassination, decades of corruptive behavior, and very likely criminal behavior that placed at risk the nation’s very security through their malfeasance? Worse, is this election a simple house of mirrors and both candidates reflect the same essential person?
The seeds of this disaster of democracy were planted over many years and have many contributors. We lost our compass as a society when the binding force of holding common virtues gave way to an undisciplined meme of the immature, to do your own thing and accept no consequence, and was subsequently elevated to the status of ultimate virtue for the society as a whole. Individual rights, once celebrated as protecting one’s intellectual capability of changing their own life tract and protecting individual expression against the tyranny of the rulers, became the compromise of giving up the right of individual beliefs for the right of being anti-societal and forcing society to accept. Some bargain there. Life in this set of “freedoms” is one of constant hypocrisies – demanding unique freedoms and demanding others reduce their understanding of virtue to bend to your own. This gashing of virtues has led to candidates stating they are best positioned to restore virtues because they have lived lives of literally ignoring every one of them and have paid no penalty.
The concept of “cleaning house” by voting in the ‘outsider’ attracts many voters this year in the theory that burning down all foundations is the best tact to severing our connection with this path we have been on. Given the alternative, it is easy to see the attraction to this option. The hard truth is of course the outsider has always lived as an insider, showing no identified introspection that would suggest he has any remorse for his life inside the bubble, or would govern any differently. In fact, at times he has shown dark behaviors of personal threat and intimidation towards those that disagree and quiet passiveness in those supporters who hold racist or violent beliefs, that border on a very dangerous fascist core.
The alternative candidate has shown her core to be the intertwining of power and greed that is even more dangerous. Decades of using levers of power to create personal wealth has destroyed her capacity to separate out the nation’s best interests from her own family. Recent Wikileaks emails suggest the personal aggrandizement of the Clintons through their foundation has already succeeded 60 million, with more millions yet mandated, for favors that have stunk for decades as “pay for play”. As they used to say – you can put lipstick on a pig…. The result as is typical for those who would hang around the slop for some reflected glory or profit, they are increasingly covered in the mud themselves, whatever their original virtues.
The self corrective mechanisms once in place to identify and root out such people have long since been broken. The Department of Justice progressively functions as the long arm of intimidation and coverup of those who benefit from the status quo. The FBI has twisted itself into knots to avoid doing due diligence, providing immunity to the most culpable, and injecting itself into interpretation of the law rather than obtaining the dispassionate elements of facts that would allow judgement to be considered in an objective setting. The tools for maintaining the independence of our virtues used to be housed in individual’s personal value system fortified by the shared virtues we all respected. In positions of power, the weapon of choice was resignation for both the virtuous and the culpable. On Saturday, June 20th, 1973, President Nixon, in an effort to maintain executive privilege in a matter of potential criminality demanded his Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire the Watergate independent special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who had subpoenaed Nixon’s personal secretly recorded tapes of Oval Office conversations. Believing the demand to be extra-constitutional, Richardson resigned. Nixon then demanded the deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus on identical principles, resigned. Nixon was forced to go to the Solicitor General Robert Bork and name him acting Attorney General who finally complied.
The acts of personal virtue in the face of enormous pressure inevitably had their profound effects. Within eight weeks, Nixon himself was forced to resign under the weight of proposed articles of impeachment reinforced by his behavior. Robert Bork, one of the truly brilliant minds of constitutional law, destined for a career culmination on the Supreme Court was forever tainted by his subservience to the executive at the risk of his personal virtues, and was turned down by the US Senate for the Supreme Court in 1987, a Senate that had not forgotten or forgiven.
The tradition of resignation for principle has left our country’s political class and our society as a whole. When the Attorney General of the United States sees massive flaunting of the laws that protect our nation’s security, does she demand an independent and cleansing investigation that upholds the rule of law? No – she rapidly secures immunity for those most culpable to protect the executive against any exposure of the slovenliness that may well have reached the Oval Office. No resignation for those who left their principles long ago. Does the FBI director who recognizes the extent of involvement demand the concept of equal protection and enforcement under the rule of law, or resign as a matter of personal integrity and respect for that virtue? No – he tries to ride the razor’s edge of acceptance and survival. Does the Chief Justice of the United States when facing the objective extra-constitutional nature of a law in its coercion upon all citizens to purchase a governmentally mandated product, stand up for the principles of his life long advocation, or resign in the aftermath? No-he subverts the law in front of him to call the mandate a tax, when no one, pro or con to the law which will affect society permanently has argued, to protect his ‘reputation’ as non-interventionalist.
Ten days from now, we will face the most odious choice in years in the election booth. We are in this position, both Democrat and Republican, because we have wallowed in the mud with such people, and have gotten used to the dirt and the stench, to the point where it doesn’t effect us when we are covered in it. Certainly as long as we don’t notice it affects us, all is forgiven. We have sacrificed our personal virtue as a beacon of how to act, and how to expect others to act. The result will cover us all, and not in glory. Regardless, this is a democracy, and it relies on participation. As someone recently said, vote your conscience, but vote you must. However it turns out, the new America must demand a more rigid standard of virtue from the winner, or prepare to withdraw support from those who will not be virtuous. We must ask of all who serve, and of ourselves, the willingness to balance the scales of virtue, or resign in their absence – to let those in power know, their hollow core of corruption will no longer be tolerated. We will need to show once and for all, they don’t own us, and they can’t buy our personal virtue.
King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
I have had a long respite from the challenges of maintaining an interesting blog, spending a goodly portion of time traveling to London and the surrounding countryside, storing up wonderful memories and visuals I cant wait to share with you. For an amateur historian like myself, the journey was a veritable feast. A city and country chocked full of the magnificence of 2500 years of people, places, and events that form so many of the cornerstones of western thought and civilization. But then, you knew that already. I will do my best to resist a tired litany of the stops that you can get from any travel guide or commemorative. Sometimes, unassuming things you note on your travels have a more profound effect upon you then the more illustrious sites. And certainly can make for more interesting writing.
For instance, I was struck by this beautiful statue of King George III under a pleasant tree on the east end of Pall Mall, the thoroughfare extending along St James Park, from St. James Street projecting towards Trafalgar Square. The statue, dedicated in 1836, sculpted by Matthew Coates Wyatt, is a magnificent equestrian statue showing a confident and intelligent sovereign aboard his powerful steed Adonis. One can certainly not say that the statue’s location is not situated among the most prominent street addresses in London. But as statues go, it is quite isolated from the nation’s most honored heroes, from Nelson soaring over Trafalgar Square to Prince George, Duke of Cambridge on Whitehall to the brooding Churchill gazing upon Parliament. The Boulevard of Whitehall the perfect scale for pageantry and prestige. And George III? Under a tree off of Pall Mall.
I’m sure I’m making too much of the statue’s location but it works into the psyche that the location is the subtle reference to this king having done something not associated with the other glamorous statuary subjects. George III lost some serious empire. And the nation memorialized the monarch in a respectful but not quite forgiving location.
George III ascended to the throne in 1760, and for the next 59 years served his nation with the longest reign of any male monarch in British history. By the time of his death in 1820, George III had presided over an epic period of history with both spectacular triumphs and ignominious defeats that have few equals in that nation’s annals. A descendant of the Hanover line of kings that had ruled Great Britain from 1714 to rescue the country from the succession crisis that resulted from the end of the House of Stuart as a provider of sovereigns. Despite being associated with German royalty, George III was a complete breath of fresh air when he first ascended the throne. This king was the first of the Hanoverian line born in England, proud of his englishness in speech, and a true son of the Enlightenment. He spoke multiple languages, was a religious and ethical man, immersed himself in science and other scholarly pursuits, and ruled the country with an eye on transforming the island nation into the most modern and powerful of nations on earth. Fortuitously in 1763, just three years into his reign, he stood astride a colossus that had just defeated its mortal enemy France in a world war, that resulted in England gaining a huge swath of the North American continent. The fragile english colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America could now look over two thousand miles of common language, law and commerce without the competition of a hostile French periphery. The new King could define himself as ruler of one of the great empires in human history.
Oh, to be King.
The problems started almost immediately with victory. The huge debt incurred in achieving the massive military victory had to be paid, and the King was not so enlightened when it came to the relationship of sovereign to subject. The Americans, who had gained security and spectacular opportunity with the expulsion of the French, were expected to help pay for their home country achieving such bounties for them. It would take the form initially of the Stamp Acts, means of deriving revenue from the Americans to help pay for the war that all had benefited from. Which takes us back to the Enlightenment, which brought new ideas from people like John Locke that influenced the American colonists to the point of confrontation with their king. Taxation without representation, however imprecise in the actual actions of the British parliament and king, was an intolerable act to the colonists. By 1775, the pressure cooker exploded into armed violence, and the king was faced with real insurrection. Kings and insurrection don’t go over well, and George III was not about to allow such affronts to his absolute authority.
How serious was the King? Ever so serious. Great Britain, so recently involved in worldwide conflict and stretched financially, determined through the will of its King to raise the largest amphibious force to that time assembled, and move over 35,000 fully trained and armed troops across the ocean to crush the rebellious colonists and their ragtag army. The idea that a set of colonies orders of magnitude larger than the homeland would be allowed to separate was absolute anathema.
Yet, in one of the truly amazing outcomes in history, the underdogs managed to beat their masters in an 8 year long struggle. The King was forced to release through treaty millions of square miles of the North American continent so soon after previous triumph. The humiliation so great, King George III was willing to abdicate as a testimonial to his acceptance of his role in the debacle. That’s how you end up under a tree in an obscure corner of a park.
But the saga and pathos of course don’t end there. Under George III’s rule, the loss of portions of North America propelled a sequence of events that culminated in the overthrow of the monarchy in France, the very real danger of an invading republican army from France, and progressively the crisis propagated by the rise of a military genius dictator on the continent named Napoleon Bonaparte that threatened the very existence of the monarchy. True to form, King George III once again marshaled his forces, and under the epic triumphant heroism of Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar and the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, Great Britain reigned supreme. Guess where their statues ended up.
Crushing Louis XV and gaining half a continent. Crushing Napoleon and gaining an empire. One might see a good reason to place poor King George III more among the pantheon of national heroes. But losing to Americans, that just proved undigestible. King George III steadily buffeted against mental illness, and by the time of the triumph of Waterloo, was in no position to reorient people’s opinions.
The record would suggest one of Britain’s more substantial monarchs, and the peerless gift he made to the nation of a library befitting of an enlightened world power is still seen today in the masterful library of King George III in the British museum.
As an American, I am certainly glad that King George III was the rigid foil upon which a great nation was able to birth and overcome. But a little bit sympathy and respect is in order to someone who on the basis of one loss has seen forever tainted his role in his nation’s greatness.
I’m not saying move the statue, but maybe when you’re in a rush to see all the other paeans to winners, remember old George didn’t do so bad himself.
We are 15 years removed from one of those seminal events in history when a shared recollection is seared into our consciousness for all time. The shock of the first impact on the North tower on one of the most serenely beautiful September mornings. The confusion as to how such an accident could happen, only to be followed shortly later by subsequent second strike to the South tower, with the agonizing realization of the premeditation. Then a brutal morning of accelerating chaos and death. A third plane strikes the Pentagon in Washington DC. The immolated south tower of the World Trade Center collapses. A hijacked fourth plane headed to destroy the nation’s capitol is driven to the ground by brave passengers in a field in Pennsylvania. The North tower of the World Trade Center collapses.
It has been 102 minutes since the onset. Thousands are dead. The nation is paralyzed. Air traffic is grounded. The President of the most powerful country in the history of the world, is sequestered in Armageddon mode.
Fifteen years has not been long enough to remove fully the memory of the raw emotions of helplessness as one watched in real time the unfolding horror. The confusion, the fear of potentially more events, and the slowly building outrage that over the next weeks fused the nation’s will to act are equally memorable.
The great sacrifices of that morning, the indescribable courage, and the subsequent responses are known more intensely and personally to the families of those directly involved. The passenger brigade that selflessly chose communal suicide to stop the terrorists who planned to use Flight 93 for further horrible destruction. The police and firemen who went into the burning towers to rescue as many as they could before the sequential collapse took many of their own lives. The pilots of unarmed fighter jets preparing to take down through impact any plane that remained in the air as a potential terrorist weapon against Americans.
All are remembered as the indications of the national character. What is less remembered because it does not fit for some the political narrative for some is the performance of the nation’s government to identify the ringleaders and hunt them down, eliminate the terror cells at their source in Afghanistan, and most impressively, for eight years prevent any further terror events on the nation’s soil.
The great coming together through national calamity has been clouded over the distance of fifteen years by a progressive sense of detachment, despite multiple events of recent revealing the ongoing and very real present danger that has percolated from the death cults of radical Islam. We are somehow anesthetized to the concept of struggle and what is at stake. We accept “events” as workplace violence or mental illness, when the perpetrators clearly announce their motivations. We stand in long security lines to travel, to attend public events, losing our own freedoms to pretend to protect us against ourselves, when the evil is before for all to see. We have been hacked, Snowdened, even bullied by our own government to reveal our most personal information as a side effect of the death cult piggybacking itself upon modern technology. Most devastatingly, we have begun to reject actual history for made up narratives that impugn the leaders who responded that day, and the decisions that led to enormous sacrifice of treasure and our nation’s finest people in conflicts borne from the violence.
In New York City this morning, at a remembrance ceremony, two candidates desiring to lead this nation through future challenges, two candidates who are commissioned to help this great nation stay the course in a sea of danger and threat, were present to attempt to suggest they were up to the job. Two old, tired, and reactionary candidates. One could not even get through the entire event without having to be helped from the public stage. Our full history is not yet written from the calamity of 09/11/2001, and the reality of sclerotic leaders must make America look to her enemies as a very vulnerable and wounded prey.
Fifteen years is a long time, but in the tides of history an eye-blink. We must try to hold on through our time of inwardness and sclerosis to remember what it is that they hate about us, and what is at stake. Ideas that are eternal, and eternally young. Freedom. Liberty. Opportunity. Civility. Justice.
A world that remembers such things, and treasures such things, will ultimately triumph. No death cult can long weather the illumination of ideals of such innate human power. We shall be strong.
The blessed gift of summer, warm, long days and star filled nights, with the nature’s bounty in full bloom, is brief but treasured paradise for every midwesterner. August then arrives, and the buildup of heat begins to linger, with more muggy humidity and flying bugs, more substantial thunderstorms, and the first hint of the etherial nature of warm pleasantries in a northern clime. These are the dog days, and even the dogs know it. The energy lags. The baseball team is going nowhere. The world is skittish about the number of unhinged people with grievances looking for a violent moment in the sun. The political scene is an unadulterated mess. The Olympics are sliding into the politically correct abyss. Maybe its best to just curl up in a ball, and sleep it off.
Historian Andrew Roberts in the UK Telegraph reminds us August, named for the most dominant of Roman Caesars, has been notorious for being the month of great upheaval. The calamity known as World War I was triggered in August 2014 when massive mobilizations across Europe triggered the inevitable initiation of direct conflict between million man armies. World War II was seared to a close in the dropping of the two atomic bombs on August 6th, and August 9th 1945 in a fitting close to the Armageddon of World War II, launched on August 31st, 1939 by the Nazi dictator who fondly dreamed about Gotterdammerung. The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein decided August 2nd 1990, was an appropriate time to attempt to take over a third of the world’s oil with an invasion of Kuwait and in all probability the Arab Gulf States, until the United States and its allies determined to upset his fantasy of untold wealth and power over the next 6 months. Caesar Augustus would likely have been offended that the violent month would be associated with the man who brought the world Pax Romana. Not so much the violent part, just the fact that leaders were unable to instill the iron discipline that prevented upstarts from starting conflagrations threatening the order of things.
The world is drifting into muggy somnolence this August. Polls have suggested a waning interest, particularly among youth, for the engagement, hard work, and need for compromise, that sustains democratic rule. Despite the abysmal records of socialist top down governments, there is a growing comfort with the idea of a “strong” leader to go above the heads of legislatures where nasty differences in opinion have to be worked out, and have the efficiencies of decisions that are determined to be in our “best interest”. The United States, with almost a perfect process of checks and balances to prevent the development of a supreme leader, finds that its current President has used extra-legal means to secure his agenda, and nothing is done about it. To secure a treaty with the arch enemy Iranian mullahs, Obama made an agreement that didn’t require Senate approval as demanded in the Constitution, and flaunted the laws placed to prevent paying ransom for hostages, making Americans everywhere at risk for the long arm of terrorists. So much for the checks and balances. Its current candidates for the executive office, Hillary Clinton, the felonious sieve of our nation’s security, continues in a pattern typical for her entire public life, to lie and deceive with the intent to exhaust ear, and eventually the rectitude of the voter. The water canon Donald Trump, spews out conflicted concepts unburdened by circumspect thought, suggesting only The Donald is capable of solving an infinity of national problems. Not with solutions, mind you, simply the power of extra-constitutional will. Sounds pretty “strong man” to me. The two party system that propelled these two anti-democratic poseurs has made a shambles of the idea of principled democracy. It will not be enough to simply roll up in a ball. We are going to need a significant shower to wash off the rhetorical dung.
Out there exists more of the same. A disconnected populous takes selfies to record their own existence, not their society’s accomplishment. People carelessly give up their unique identity more and more to nefarious software parasites that steal identity like they used to steal jewels, destroying the trust in the marketplace, the concept of citizenry, and the power of the vote. Athletic contests are tainted with doping and men are running as women to defeat women running as women, to alter artificially the concept of competition, and more fundamentally the idea of envisioning the accomplishment of an outcome based on the concept of effort, dedication, and equal opportunity. Judges seek to actively overrule laws that offend their political senses, not their training, regarding the process of law and the importance of rule of law in a democracy. The somnolence extends to the “governmentalizing” of health care, where life prolonging decisions will be made on politically correct behaviors, not by practitioners and patients objectively dealing in a private way with disease and mortality.
Oh, the dog days. Its hard to look at them as anything other than something to be tolerated rather than overcome. A nice secure place to roll up in a ball and sleep it off seems to definitely have its merits. Of course, at some point, we are going to have to wake up, stretch, look around, and get to work and start fixing this mess.
