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.