Trust Us... Your Future Only LOOKS Like a Grave

I return to certain subjects the way a prospector returns to his favorite ghost-town--with a kind of morbid affection, and with utter confidence that I will pass unobserved. People don't care about the truth. They care about their own convenience (and let us admit that Al Gore's book has a grand title, though the rest is downhill)--but the "real truth", as opposed to the easy-opening, disposable variety abundant during every election cycle, demands arduous labor to unearth. Old prospector that I am, I sometimes go years without finding it.

Who can say what's true about the global economy? I know that I do NOT believe what I am told by both major parties: that it is our key to strength and prosperity. I remarked to my wife last week that oranges seemed to be in short supply, a bag of withered specimens costing about 20% more than what I paid for good fruit a year ago. She answered that Wal-Mart carries Australian oranges, which are scarcely cheap. (How could they be? Freighting has to cost something in these days of expensive fuel.) I told her to hold off on them. Withered fruit is seldom inedible.

Our exchange got me to thinking... why would we import oranges from halfway around the world? In the miserable region, alternately very wet and very dry, where I live, I am nonetheless able to grow apricots, and my first apple and orange trees are also coming along. Has the weather been so bad as all that in Florida and California and the Rio Grande Valley? Or has the hostility to "guest workers" been so virulent that growers simply can't get their crop in at all? Why, in the latter case, do we not see rare and quite costly but really luscious-looking oranges at the store? What's going on?

I know what MIGHT be going on. Food-producing has become mega-business. The federal subsidizing of "farms" is another of those deplorable scandals which have been allowed to drift under the news industry's radar because people just don't care--they want bread and circuses, not long chains of cause and effect. "Mom and Pop" farmers don't let all their harvest rot on branch and vine because they can't find slave labor: they bring in what they can and sell it at a nice profit, often at little roadside stands. The farming industry, in contrast, seems incapable of keeping us supplied in inexpensive staples. Maybe its magnates can charge higher prices abroad... yes, and maybe they can make their countrymen pay higher prices at home by importing produce from overseas operations in which said magnates have invested. Or maybe they wish to force down our throats--along with a rare drop of orange juice--the massive registration of "citizens" who will vote in enormous, language-and-ethnicity determined blocs. After all, these grandees list agribusiness as only one page of their highly diversified portfolio. They intend to fry much larger fish, perhaps running for office, perhaps content simply to have "their guy in DC" multiplying their wealth with favorable legislation.

Specific names, specific charges? No, I have none. I'm not a journalist: I have no support-structure to assist me in research, no insider-contacts, no secret data bases. I am expected, therefore, to trust those who "do this for a living"... trust them all the way to the grave, I suppose. As I consider this "duty" to defer to "experts", I am reminded of a passage in the last of Jules Romains's six broadcasts to his countrymen inhabiting occupied France in 1941 (a collection which I translated this summer). The passage runs as follows:

They are bringing us down, my friends—all of us, France herself—and along with France, all that she has ever represented of worth, of faith, and of promise to the world. Last week, the first item of several very worrisome news reports arrived here: specifically, the extraordinary allocution of Marshal Pétain, who in substance said these words to the French people. “Don’t concern yourselves about anything. Don’t bother your heads with anything. Let those of us in power make all the decisions. And if you should chance to wake up tomorrow and find your wife lying with her throat cut by an executive order or your daughter transported to a house of prostitution, rest assured that there will be reasons for it all which don’t concern you. Just keep on maintaining a positive outlook without getting involved in these matters.”

I may not be as bright as George Will or Bill Krystol... but it seems to me that playing the globalist trump card has two devastating consequences overlooked by both of these luminaries. That the "play" should be inscrutable to the humble likes of me implies that our republic can no longer function as such--that things are just too complex, too technical, for the average bloke with a vote, and that an enlightened oligarchy must rule our future. The second consequence follows inexorably from the nature of oligarchy itself: i.e., even if we blindly trust our present globalist gurus, their office will sooner or later be occupied by shady characters unworthy of that trust.

The exponents of globalism, then, are working toward the utter subversion of the United States--if not through the policy in itself, than through the protective vapor of "specialization" with which it surrounds figures of arbitrary, almost unlimited power. I think our representatives should HAVE to explain such policies in words that most of us can grasp... or otherwise keep their sweaty hands off the status quo.

In the meanwhile, I'll keep planting what seeds I can recover from those withered oranges. I'm afraid I put more trust in the sun and the rain than in the gurus of globalism.