The Classic Liberal Blog

The Day After Hell Wins the Election

It was a story my Dad used to tell about the Bulge: he, a staff sergeant, was asked by a green lieutenant, "Sergeant, how I do get these men to dig foxholes?"

"Just wait" was his reply.

Sure enough, when the German "daisy clippers" blasted overhead, turning the white wasteland dark with evergreen boughs, there were "foxholes everywhere."

Such is human nature, even American nature, that the story was told over and over, in different variations, across the battlefields of World War II.  It was told as Admirals and Generals who were "up there" in the 30s cocktail circuits passed out of range and were replaced by names heretofore unknown to the American public.  The same thing happened during the Civil War -- during the Revolution.  Human beings, even alert, highly trained human beings, are not proactive; we are reactive.   We go from "crisis to crisis", as a mentor in my youth once explained.  American democracy cannot solve problems, can it?  We "throw money" at poverty, drug addiction, education . . . . What do we get in return?  Bureaucracies, dumb as oxen, that do little to improve life and much to retard economic innovation.  A vital component has been missing from the American experiment: innovation.  We have deadened our nerves and enervated our limbs with empty rhetoric and creeping tax increases.  I doubt the average American even knows what being an American means anymore.  We are lost, adrift in a sea of warring bumperstickers.

And there's fear, a palpable, stomach-chilling fear in the land of my birth.  What are we fearful of?  Obama?  I don't think so.  I think, deep down, most Americans know that what Dr. Zero says is dead on:

The future holds the final, systemic crash of the New Deal and Great Society. How far away is it? It’s hard to recalibrate the doomsday clocks fast enough to keep up with our current tidal wave of deficit spending. I think we have about fifteen years, after factoring in the poisonous effects of desperate measures taken to hold off disaster, like the Value Added Tax. I can imagine many world events that would accelerate that timetable considerably.  A Word to the Weary

The problem of torpor is only part of America's problem.  A deeper problem is what has to be called ideological: a good portion of Americans have handed over their hopes and security to the government.  These Americans -- Democrats and "progressives" -- have stopped thinking in terms of personal responsibility.  If there's a problem on the street or in the schools, the State is expected to solve that problem.  Those of us who fear the state understand the other half of the equation: if you don't want to be controlled, you have to exercise self-control.  "Everything we needed to know we learned in kindergarten" wasn't some phony-baloney warm, fuzzy hustle: it included enough discipline to push us past a willingness to surrender of our wills.  This isn't true of many Americans.  Who would believe in Al Gore's lies about the weather?

Someone waiting for someone else to do his work for him; someone who wants to be told, as Erich Fromm described, what to do.  Eerily, there are hundreds of politicians who know this, and feast on it, like ghouls.  That is my America at the moment.

A variation of that is the Western Woman's love of effeminate men.  How long do you think that will last?

It won't last.  When the fire comes from heaven, when all Hell breaks loose, and those you love lay dead in the snow . . . .

You'll do what needs to be done.  Drug addiction, fashion, sytlin' and profilin' . . . . will be slaughtered without mercy as we revert to survival mode.  "Liberalism", as it's been called, will be skinned and roasted with glee.  Fantasy will be rejected with hellish vigor.

For now?

We wait, and watch, in disbelief.

Wyblog: How to Derail Socialists and Restore America