“You
Didn’t Write That”
A
few weeks ago, President Obama committed the infamous gaffe (allowed
to leak through the media because The Fourth Estate could not itself
discern any problem with his sentiments) of announcing that none of
us has ever accomplished anything on his own. I noted at the time in
my weekly ramble that Mr. Obama had neither written his own speech
nor “evolved” his own ideas on the subject, because I had heard
the same spiel four decades ago as an undergraduate. In my Economics
class, however, the lines of dependency clearly led to other workers,
not to a huge state bureaucracy; and while the work force is indeed
public-sector in a socialist republic, Obama’s engineers had
originally intended the facilitators in the allusion to be guys with
wrenches and shovels, not desk jockeys.
I
serendipitously ran across the following passage this week in a short
story, “El Hijo del Camino”, composed by Jacinto Octavio Picón
for his collection, Cuentos
de mi Tiempo.
The central character has labored at dozens of blue-collar jobs for
years when, in the course of doing some drudgery or other, he
blunders into a lavishly decorated room. He grows yet more dazzled
when the most beautiful woman he has ever seen parades through the
glittering space on her way to a regal entertainment, dressed to the
hilt. These are his thoughts (in my translation):
The
young man, ignorant and uneducated, incapable of analyzing what he
was experiencing—yet a man, when all was said and done—felt the
temptation and the anxiety that a ripe fruit produces when placed
before a child’s mouth.
At
first he remained suspended in a spasm of surprise, then he murmured
to himself with the speed of thought that everything contained in
this wondrous precinct and everything embodied in the beauty of this
extraordinary woman had been passed during its birth, in one way or
another, through his own hands. Coal wrenched from the bowels of the
earth and converted into torrents of light… crystal molded in the
furnaces that had seared his throat… iron forged in the fires where
he had scorched his fingers… silks synthesized from substances that
had poisoned his lungs… everything—he had contributed to all of
it! And none of it—nothing—was for him!
It
was then that Lucy appeared to his desire as a marvelous creation in
which he had put the bone of his bone and blood of his blood until he
had produced a fusion of all human riches. Why did she not belong to
him by right? Were they bound to live eternally close together and
separated at the same time, like a courtesan and her slave? What
cruel law was handling him thus? Who was its author?
Of
course, the encounter doesn’t turn out well for our protagonist.
Chased out of the mansion for pawing over this child of privilege, he
returns with a bomb, is caught, and ends up on the scaffold. And by
proxy, he could be said to have built the scaffold, too! All the
work and none of the reward… do you get it now?
Cuentos
was published in 1895. That’s EIGHTEEN-ninety five.
Progressivism, as we readily see in studying its life cycle,
progresses at the speed of a molasses glacier.
Thirty
Percent or Forty-Seven?
In
a piece that I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I speculated that
probably one American in three is an immovable Obama supporter. I
had no hard stats upon which to base my claim—only personal
experience. Two members of my immediate family will vote for an
extended Obama reign, beyond the shadow of a doubt; or the second
will, at any rate, if he can only bring himself to get out of bed and
venture into the land of live people for a few minutes. The first,
whose support is granite-hard, is actually voting for a self-serving
construct in which Obama’s silhouette occupies a keystone position.
If he did not exist, she would have to create him—and he indeed
does not exist as she imagines him, and so she has indeed created his
legend, his eidon:
the Platonic idea of The Enlightened One. That the egotistical
pustule which encases her civic-consciousness is eminently vulnerable
to the lancet of clear thinking explains why no one can engage her in
a political conversation (no one, that is, except other emotional
cripples in her tiny pool of public service employees, among whom she
is certain to find only confirmation). A sudden access of sane
understanding would force her to overhaul her entire existence.
Such
people are the truly invincible foe, from Mr. Romney’s perspective.
He misidentified them in drawing his calculations from “objective
statistics” that reflect the number of Americans on the dole. His
faux
pas,
to the extent that he made one, was therefore to assume that a single
mother of three who depends upon taxpayer handouts for survival is
fully comfortable with that arrangement. I and many others believe
that he was mistaken in this assumption. Again, I just have a hunch:
but I strongly suspect that a black unwed mother with no high school
diploma is far more likely to leap at the chance of altering her
situation than a white college-educated spinster professional who
simply cannot survive psychically if she doesn’t believe herself
smarter and better than everyone else on the block.
Sometimes
Romney is too much of a businessman. He needs to pull his head out
of his figures occasionally and ponder the dark mysteries of human
nature. It really isn’t the economy, Mitt—not at rock-bottom.
It’s the values.
Collateral
Damage in Operation “Nuke First Amendment”
What
do slain border agent Brian Terry and slain ambassador Christopher
Stevens have in common, besides being dedicated and courageous public
servants? Little to nothing, let us hope.
But
the question is increasingly being asked, by Sean Hannity and others,
“Why was Ambassador Stevens unguarded on the eve of his death? Why
is it that even the Navy Seals murdered at his side had not actually
been designated to protect him?” At best, we may assume that
calculations liberally seasoned with criminal naiveté and
incompetent stupidity were at fault—something about as well
proportioned to reality as Gabby Giffords’ open-air event without
security in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities: some lunacy
in that proportion, but raised by the power of ten or twelve.
Agent
Terry himself could be said to have fallen victim to the same gross
incompetence. There was certainly nothing personal in his being “set
up to die” by the minions of Attorney General Holder. Yet someone
was indeed supposed to die. Several someones, or several hundred
nobodies—ordinary Mexican and U.S. citizens who would become
nameless statistics, and whose sheer number would cause a public
outcry against the easy availability of legal firearms. The result
was to be an abrogation of the Second Amendment. Those of us who no
longer believe in the Easter Bunny and Obama’s Stash know that
perfectly well. Holder needed bodies, and Terry was in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
So
what about Stevens? Things haven’t been going particularly well
for Campaign Obama, whatever you hear from Scott Pelley and Wolf
Blitzer. Currently, the uproar from the few credible journalists
that remain in our crumbling culture concerns why the Administration
failed to respond to numerous warnings about imminent trouble on the
9/11 anniversary. But what if the trouble had been fully, accurately
anticipated and the response planned long in advance? What if the
response we saw was the one planned?
Administration
spokes-zombies have certainly been reiterating the “Islamaphobe
Christian fundamentalist hate-speech video” as the culprit just as
if they were repeating the rehearsed line of a play in which a fellow
actor had forgotten his part. Maybe he would remember his words if
they kept mouthing theirs. What if the forgotten line was supposed
to run something like, “Romney… Romney did it. Romney’s
people… they do things like this, all the time!”
What
if American embassies in Arab countries had to go up in smoke so that
American voters could see how dangerous the First Amendment is with
so many crazed, venom-spitting Christians on the loose? What if the
embassies and their personnel had to be left unguarded so as to
create the maximum detonation to draw the maximum of attention from
the American electorate?
In
that case, Christopher Stevens was collateral damage, just like Brian
Terry. The engineers of occasions like these, recall, are
ideological descendents of that luminary who famously informed
posterity that you need to break some eggs to make an omelet.
May
both of these young men find eternal peace in the embrace of a loving
God.
Can
We Please Stop Paying Them to Kill Us?
While
I’m on the subject of the Middle East… Rand Paul has desperately
been trying to terminate our billion-and-a-half bucks of aid to
Egypt, opposed first by senate Democrats but lately, and more
stubbornly, by his own party. Why should we pay them to kill us?
Why should we pay any of them? Why are we giving guns, instruction,
and money to people in Iraq, Pakistan, and now Egypt and Libya who
will end up using our munificence to murder our sons and daughters?
We romped through this suicidal dance with the Zetas in Mexico,
assuming that they were an elite force loyal to their government
rather than a bunch of unmoored young men with no conscience and
empty pockets. For that matter, we did the same thing with Mao’s
Communist rebels throughout World War Two—arming them to the teeth,
that is (and pouring goods and money into Stalin’s lap), over
Chiang Kai-shek’s frail cries for prudence and restraint. How many
Americans did we lose in Korea and Vietnam? How many tens of
millions of innocent bystanders were destroyed as they tried to till
their native soil?
Two
counter-arguments always float to the surface like the wormy debris
of a sunken ship. One is that our enemies will descend into whatever
vacuum of influence is left by our withdrawal. Bob Beckel always
invokes the Chinese for this villainous role (in patent contradiction
of his side’s railing against xenophobia and in support,
apparently, of colonialism). Would the Chinese really like to have
Central Asia and North Africa? I say we put a shiny red bow on both
of them. These “nations” need to hammer out their own millennial
problems until they tire of braining each other and of inviting
foreign adventurism through their gross ineptitude. I feel for their
women and children… but you don’t make an abused wife’s life
easier by smacking her husband for beating her. You’ll probably
get her killed. As for the oil that, I presume, represents the
football not to be fumbled to China under any circumstances… maybe
we should just concentrate on keeping China out of oil fields in the
Western Hemisphere, and go full-speed-ahead with fracking.
Of
course, Objection Two is Israel. If we pull out of the Arab world
and leave it to grow up or self-destruct, what will become of our
Israeli allies? This is a very strange protest to be hearing in
2012, when the winner of a recent Nobel Peace Prize is smoking Muslim
bad guys from the stratosphere like Bill Cody picking off buffalo.
Why do we need boots on the ground when we have drones in the air?
The one piece of real estate that truly needs pedestrian patrolling
for our national security is our southern border. Israel has enough
nukes to stare down all of her rude neighbors at once, Arab Muslims
have never been so united against Jews that they can long abstain
from killing each other, and our own high-tech defense systems can be
operated from a concrete bunker in Kentucky as long as we don’t
sell all of our secrets to the Chinese and defund all of our programs
to buy El Supremo a life-membership in the Oval Office.
We
need to bring our troops and citizens home, withdraw from the U.N.,
form a new series of alliances based on our interests and our values,
and then invite other nations into the game when and if they decide
to behave like adults. We need to stop paying dysfunctional
societies to kill our children.
Bring
on the Polls—Make My Day
If
I could ask Santa for one early Christmas present, it would be the
continuation of these ridiculous polls that show Barack Obama
enjoying an insuperable lead. The designers of these Willie Wonka
phone-a-thons think that conservatives will grow demoralized and stay
home on Election Day… but the result stands in polar opposition to
the intent. Conservatives, instead, are pouring their hard-earned
money into closely contested races, including Romney’s (which would
otherwise be a very tough sell to them). They will also crawl to
their polling places in November even if Black Panthers break both
their legs. The other side, meanwhile, is already temperamentally
disinclined to alight from its collective gluteus
maximus
for any sort of public commitment. They belong to the 47%, remember,
who have grown accustomed to having life delivered to their doorstep.
(I said “belong to”—I didn’t say that the 47% consists
solely of their ilk.) The polls are giving them a comfortable,
rational excuse just to stay home and play on Facebook.
PLEASE
continue this, ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate (and you,
too, NBC employees). You’re making my day, and maybe saving our
century.
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