I suppose that the globalist “vision” is not necessarily all bad. I can see how some people—how a certain kind of person (the kind whom I would never number among my closest friends) would consider it a good thing. If the entire planet is ruled by an elite of the wealthy and the powerful (some of whom will enjoy vestigial “election” to office for a while by a dull populace expertly manipulated by bread and circuses), then nuclear war would cease to make sense. Only the wealthy and the powerful would have access to black boxes and red buttons… and why should any of them want to incinerate the great global goose laying golden eggs by the billion? Standing armies will be replaced by riot police, for the new enemy will be the unskilled masses that demand sustenance of every kind from the system while putting nothing essential into it. We may survive as a species indefinitely under this scenario… some of us: members of the elite and their friends. The mob will eventually be controlled (as it is already being controlled in “developed” nations) by birth control. It will pose a diminishing threat, that is, because its numbers will steadily diminish. In the meantime, a pandemic such as “bird flu” (which has once again broken out in India) will most certainly thin the ranks of the poorly insulated and inoculated within the next two decades. Outbreaks secretly introduced and “managed” by the elite need not even be the means of delivery. Never have so many with such poor hygiene traveled so far so often at such close quarters and so profligately overmedicated for rather minor ailments—you could not possibly devise a better scenario for breeding a global scourge.
The rash of “bail-outs” currently underway, blessed by every globalist/elitist from the Clintons and the Bushes to Barack Obama and John McCain, will most assuredly accomplish two things: put more power in the hands of centralized government and put the U.S. economy more firmly in the hands of the PRC’s government. I haven’t heard any elected official display enough honesty to say it in so many words… but the idea is to bury the Chinese under so many of our IOU’s that they can’t afford to let us go under—while the Chinese, in return, will be so heftily shored up by our continued outsourcing of industrial and high-tech jobs (a trend which NO speaker at any rostrum proposes reversing) that they will feel some bang in our dying buck. “Interdependency”, Bill Clinton calls it. Think of a wino with an inexhaustible stash of crack, and a crack addict with perpetual access to a brewery: the paradigm for peace in our time.
This WILL happen: it is already happening. To discuss whether or not small businesses will continue to flourish in this environment is analogous to a bunch of Tyrannosaurs discussing whether they can find more duckbills to devour farther south after the sky has already clouded over from the meteorite’s impact. You can’t put the dust back in the hole.
Obama advisor Robert Reich has already spilled the frijoles in declaring this week that special care will be taken to give MINORITY construction companies a big fat piece of bail-out pie as an epic program of public works unfolds. The recent exodus of illegal workers will be reversed, and from their numbers will be culled millions of new voters who won’t speak English, can’t ready any language, and never say no to a “stimulus” check or free beer: precisely the kind of constituency that the elite wishes to nourish until the imminent day when all elections are canceled.
Sports, at least, will be a booming industry. As the Roman elite knew, nothing placates an unruly, pampered proletariat like a day at the Coliseum. My son, the athlete, would do well to keep working on his switch-hitting and his submarine pitch. I love him dearly; and while I am fully convinced that the unexamined life is not worth living, I am just enough of an Aristotelian line-scuffer that I would prefer for the boy to relish virtue with a roof over his head.
Porn will continue to be a growth industry, and for the same reason. So will brewing and distilling: so will the manufacture of recreational drugs. (Another partial antidote to our economic misery that you will never hear seriously considered: the legalization of such drugs to create tax revenue, empty prisons of non-violent offenders, free police to do their real job, and knock the bottom out of the black market. Drug cartels would gun down any politician who effectively characterized the fight against them as anything less than a moral crusade.) Entertainment of all kinds will thrive all the way to that misty ceiling, The Foreseeable Future.
Wild cards: radical Islam, which likes to blow things up even (especially?) in the best of times; the Energy Revolution, which may put so much wealth and independence into the hands of people so removed from the settled elite (wind-farmers, geyser-cappers, lightning-harvesters) that the balance of power could shift; genuine religious faith, which sometimes makes people willingly lie down in front of trains or tanks.
But until and unless some of those cards start to emerge from the deck, prepare to be looked after, made happy, and generally “managed”. Prepare to accept the mass definition of happiness. Anticipate credit-card-like tokens which you receive from the government as you used to receive a salary from your employer, good for X dollars of approved food at your grocery store, X tickets at your local arena or stadium, X fill-ups of approved fuel, etc., etc. And when the card just doesn’t allow you to feed your one permitted child, prepare for the Big One—the “natural disaster” that will leave behind a more manageable number of “proles” like you and me. Impact has already occurred. You can’t get the dust back in the hole.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Nihil Novi, Multum Antiquissimi
I’ve taken more than a month’s leave of this space now—in fact, I was at times resolved not to return to it. Unlike those who are either paid to scribble away about current events or who hope to curry the favor of the powerful by doing so, I gain nothing very tangible by “blogging”. It sustains me in the hope, I suppose, that some few like-minded people are reading or will one day read my comments with appreciation; for man is a social being, and to the thoughtful man whose intelligence is insulted by contemporary “socializing”, the message in the bottle cast upon the wide blue sea remains a viable alternative to hermitry.
Honestly… when two out of three Americans believe that Mr. Obama will “improve” our nosedive, why even risk a conversation? Nothing against the man personally—but celebrating the election of a genetically half-African president for racial reasons only is rather like throwing a party for a newborn babe in Suite 119 as the Titanic continues to take on water. Perhaps the randomly polled are saying (in that Delphic manner which renders polls worse than useless) that the exit of George Bush is bound to bring improvement. As a citizen who voted for Bush twice—not once, but twice (and many thanks to the Democrats for running a crazed, needy crowd-whore and a mendacious, social-climbing power-addict against him)—I am of that persuasion myself: i.e., that George Bush has single-handedly accelerated the fall of the American republic inestimably and has earned himself a place in a never-to-be-written history (for who would read it among the post-literate?) beside Benedict Arnold. The office of the presidency, thanks to Bush, is now more kingship than ever. The nation, far from being more secure, might as well erase its southern border as drug cartels poise to expand their wars throughout California and Texas. (When Bush apologists insist that we haven’t suffered a terrorist attack on native soil since 9/11, they presumably mean an attack by Muslims: death by a garden-variety thug’s bullet is not to be considered terrorism—or if the dead are legal Hispanic Americans, then… well, it’s “just their culture”.) Nanny-state social programs would probably have plunged us deeply into debt even without the chasmic drain upon funds represented by the war in Iraq; Bush, may I remind you, was an Al Gore big-state paternalist way back in 1999. As for Iraq… how’s that going, by the way? Yes, the new “government” has managed to bring violence so successfully under control that it wants us gone yesterday. Would you take 5-to-1 odds that this same government will be prosecuting its own purges and assembling a Shiite theocracy within two years of our exit? How about 10-to-1 odds that our self-styled Right will persist in calling that set of circumstances a success? And need we even speak of the exponentially deteriorating scene on Russia’s border, where the Bush regime has arrogantly been courting NATO recruits like a school bully snitching candy from sack lunches up and down the table? Meanwhile, our real enemy—our ultimate enemy—owns so much of our national debt that we dare not bring our industries back home lest she call in our IOU’s. A new National Intelligence Estimate projects that China will have thoroughly unseated us from superpower status by 2025—sixteen short years from now. And among Bush’s final official acts, when he was not granting warm-fuzzy interviews to FOX correspondents or plugging his ears because Hotspur’s raven squawked “Ramos and Campeon”, was urging yet another immense plunge into debt for a new “stimulus package”. I could say a few words about Texas-size cow-prods, the President’s anatomy, and my own favorite fantasies of stimulus… but enough of that.
Taken all in all, then, this column can neither throw a life-preserver to its few faithful nor lighten the burden of apprehension borne by its author. At the moment, I cannot discern that it serves a purpose. Mr. Obama is most certainly not going to reverse any of those vectors to calamity enumerated above—he seems not even particularly pressed to extract our troops from Iraq. Sooner or later, when things “settle down” (i.e., when he builds upon the Bush legacy of “stimulating” us with Chinese loans until he has lowered the deck’s last card onto the leaning tower), he will push to legalize millions of unskilled Mexican “guest-workers” as unemployment skyrockets. More blue-collar workers mean more votes for the socialist agenda, more outsourcing and running of trade deficits (“interdependency”, as the Clintons call it) means further progress toward the one-world order at the heart of the collectivist vision. But at least with Bush finally out of the way, those whom the betrayal of human freedom, creativity, and individuality—of the human soul—genuinely outrages can shout their eleventh-hour prophecies of doom without being labeled traitors to their political party.
We will all die—and, I am convinced, we will all have to begin our residence in ultimate reality after “death” by answering for our conduct during this ephemeral trial run. To become excessively preoccupied with the trial run’s success or failure is to forget its temporary character and, thus, to lose that very faith which spurs us to do the right thing. I must not end this first (and possibly last) entry of the new year on a note of despair. It is a gift, a luxury, simply to live in a time when one may fight the good fight in such lonely and beleaguered conditions, and so display one’s mettle to such advantage. One could wish, however, that those who claim to represent the metaphysical perspective were not themselves so mired in squalid self-interest and lurid material adventurism. When the “friend” at your back is a more fearful menace than the enemy in your face, loneliness hasn’t even the pleasure of peaceful retreat.
Honestly… when two out of three Americans believe that Mr. Obama will “improve” our nosedive, why even risk a conversation? Nothing against the man personally—but celebrating the election of a genetically half-African president for racial reasons only is rather like throwing a party for a newborn babe in Suite 119 as the Titanic continues to take on water. Perhaps the randomly polled are saying (in that Delphic manner which renders polls worse than useless) that the exit of George Bush is bound to bring improvement. As a citizen who voted for Bush twice—not once, but twice (and many thanks to the Democrats for running a crazed, needy crowd-whore and a mendacious, social-climbing power-addict against him)—I am of that persuasion myself: i.e., that George Bush has single-handedly accelerated the fall of the American republic inestimably and has earned himself a place in a never-to-be-written history (for who would read it among the post-literate?) beside Benedict Arnold. The office of the presidency, thanks to Bush, is now more kingship than ever. The nation, far from being more secure, might as well erase its southern border as drug cartels poise to expand their wars throughout California and Texas. (When Bush apologists insist that we haven’t suffered a terrorist attack on native soil since 9/11, they presumably mean an attack by Muslims: death by a garden-variety thug’s bullet is not to be considered terrorism—or if the dead are legal Hispanic Americans, then… well, it’s “just their culture”.) Nanny-state social programs would probably have plunged us deeply into debt even without the chasmic drain upon funds represented by the war in Iraq; Bush, may I remind you, was an Al Gore big-state paternalist way back in 1999. As for Iraq… how’s that going, by the way? Yes, the new “government” has managed to bring violence so successfully under control that it wants us gone yesterday. Would you take 5-to-1 odds that this same government will be prosecuting its own purges and assembling a Shiite theocracy within two years of our exit? How about 10-to-1 odds that our self-styled Right will persist in calling that set of circumstances a success? And need we even speak of the exponentially deteriorating scene on Russia’s border, where the Bush regime has arrogantly been courting NATO recruits like a school bully snitching candy from sack lunches up and down the table? Meanwhile, our real enemy—our ultimate enemy—owns so much of our national debt that we dare not bring our industries back home lest she call in our IOU’s. A new National Intelligence Estimate projects that China will have thoroughly unseated us from superpower status by 2025—sixteen short years from now. And among Bush’s final official acts, when he was not granting warm-fuzzy interviews to FOX correspondents or plugging his ears because Hotspur’s raven squawked “Ramos and Campeon”, was urging yet another immense plunge into debt for a new “stimulus package”. I could say a few words about Texas-size cow-prods, the President’s anatomy, and my own favorite fantasies of stimulus… but enough of that.
Taken all in all, then, this column can neither throw a life-preserver to its few faithful nor lighten the burden of apprehension borne by its author. At the moment, I cannot discern that it serves a purpose. Mr. Obama is most certainly not going to reverse any of those vectors to calamity enumerated above—he seems not even particularly pressed to extract our troops from Iraq. Sooner or later, when things “settle down” (i.e., when he builds upon the Bush legacy of “stimulating” us with Chinese loans until he has lowered the deck’s last card onto the leaning tower), he will push to legalize millions of unskilled Mexican “guest-workers” as unemployment skyrockets. More blue-collar workers mean more votes for the socialist agenda, more outsourcing and running of trade deficits (“interdependency”, as the Clintons call it) means further progress toward the one-world order at the heart of the collectivist vision. But at least with Bush finally out of the way, those whom the betrayal of human freedom, creativity, and individuality—of the human soul—genuinely outrages can shout their eleventh-hour prophecies of doom without being labeled traitors to their political party.
We will all die—and, I am convinced, we will all have to begin our residence in ultimate reality after “death” by answering for our conduct during this ephemeral trial run. To become excessively preoccupied with the trial run’s success or failure is to forget its temporary character and, thus, to lose that very faith which spurs us to do the right thing. I must not end this first (and possibly last) entry of the new year on a note of despair. It is a gift, a luxury, simply to live in a time when one may fight the good fight in such lonely and beleaguered conditions, and so display one’s mettle to such advantage. One could wish, however, that those who claim to represent the metaphysical perspective were not themselves so mired in squalid self-interest and lurid material adventurism. When the “friend” at your back is a more fearful menace than the enemy in your face, loneliness hasn’t even the pleasure of peaceful retreat.
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