Category Archives: The State

UPDATE III: State of the Union: a ‘Disgusting Spectacle’ (Derb: Defeatist or Realist?)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, English, History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Politics, Propaganda, Reason, Republicans, Technology, The State, The Zeitgeist

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution required that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’ …) sensibility,” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire describes the State of the Union speech. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derb in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” a book I discussed in “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed'” (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=580).

John goes on to furnish the quotidian details of how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. “On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45).

Then there is the display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the audience, “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate” (this year it’ll be the family of the little girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter).

Derb analyzes this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and a trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.”

The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

Prepare to puke. The antidote is “WE ARE DOOMED.”

UPDATE I (Jan 25.): Robert, have you even read “WE ARE DOOMED”? Derb is a paleo-libertarian and a bloody good writer at that.

UPDATE II (Jan. 26): Derb: Defeatist or Realist? Van Wijk: I did not know you were among the happy faced, cheery conservatives who eschew reality and insist that the band of fools plays on, as the Titanic goes down.

Almost all of Derb’s misery making factual survey of America, in We Are Doomed, is correct (bar his biological determinism, which is supposed to sunder free will, but is not convincing). In fact, it mirrors a lot of what I’ve said and written (why, I’m cited in the book vis-a-vis Robert Putnum). There is no getting out from under:

1) Crippling government debt

2) The layers of crap culture and cultural products (literally: did you know that the MOMA, or its British equivalent, stores bodily waste in hundreds of vials produced as art?)

3) Perverted intellectual and moral standards

4) Crops of affirmatively appointed leaders, in all fields of endeavor, which will be with us for decades, if not longer, because of (1) and (2), among other reasons.

What’s your problem with that (Derb’s) rational, reality based conclusion—an analysis effected over the years in these (my own) pixelated pages?

Isn’t it clear that freedom and mass society—unfettered democracy, mass immigration mainly of voracious tax consumers with a visceral hatred for the history and historical majority of this country, on and on—cannot coexist?

It does not mean that one doesn’t continue to fight (I do), but it’s a losing proposition. Talented, industrious, taxpayers—doing highly skilled work—will become less numerous and more burdened with the years. This shrinking tax-base will be working to keep the voracious racial Idiocracy, represented faithfully by the political and intellectual class, in the style to which they have become accustomed.

(As aside: My source in one of America’s most lauded corporations, brilliant in his performance and intellectual leadership, is forever being told to develop his sorry “emotional intelligence”—even given books about this crap—as he solves the most complex of technical and logical problems. Why? because the manly, forceful, algorithmic iteration of facts, without dissolving into tears and embracing the intellectually halt and lame and dysfunctional around you: that is BAD. Men like that are not dismissed, because few can replace them. But they are cornered and cowed. Wanna tell me that a society that disempowers and subdues talent will survive?)

Isn’t it idiotic to attack the messenger, Derb? In any case, I’m glad you don’t attack me for advancing a similar message for years.

UPDATE III: To the letter about his alleged taste in poetry, Derb has provided some references in the Comments sections below. What about Louis MacNeice? I’m a poetry primitive, but I quite liked MacNeice.

Barack And The Biblical Job

Barack Obama, Crime, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Hebrew Testament, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Judaism & Jews, The State

Obama’s prose is flowery and facile. But I am told that this is what appeals to a vast number of Americans. “Healing,” having “national conversations,” hoping and dreaming, reaching for the sky and for the best of America: such meaningless meandering turns this writer’s stomach—at least as much as George Bush’s word salads did.

(By the way, Obama’s remarks in Tucson I read thanks to the New York Times’ civilized habit of providing transcripts. Not even the White House website offers text. So much for encouraging literacy. News sites are becoming a nightmare for those of us who still value the written word over the darting image. “Watch the President’s address” is what you get at Fox News’ website, where print is fast being phased out.)

In any event, the president went light on his base. He did not specifically berate the “blood libel” (a good and appropriate usage by Sarah Palin) perpetrated by the Left against the Right after the Tucson tragedy. I will, however, give him a Brownie point for citing my favorite book among the 39 Books of the Hebrew Bible: Job.

As I wrote in “Job: Jewish Individualist”: “The book of Job is still the quintessential theodicy, precisely because it entertains and reconciles the possibility of a fallible God. Then again, Jews have a tradition of arguing with God. Jacob wrestled physically with the angel of God. And Abraham haggled for the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah because he disapproved of the verdict God pronounced upon them. Job, in a manner, also argued with God and prevailed, a very unorthodox concept, considering the times.”

Obama invoked the righteous Job thus: “Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, ‘when I looked for light, then came darkness.’ Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.”

Palin pointed out that “acts like the shootings in Arizona begin and end with the criminals who commit them.” Unlike Palin, however, whose address earlier today rightly and precisely located the source of evil in the individual perpetrator, Obama here refuses to leave it at that, for this is a man who believes in the role of an interventionist central authority to shape society in politically pleasing ways. If you do not believe in free will, and fail to recognize evil in individuals—then you will be more likely to see a role for the State in the transformation of individuals before the fact:

OBAMA: “We must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.”

Look out.

Blame The Perversion Of Speech

Crime, English, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Justice, Morality, The State

I venture that it is not speech that dangerously inflames febrile passions and unstable minds, but Orwellian speech; lies that belie reality. A good example are the words of the by-now notorious and odious Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the Democrat who called Arizona a “Mecca for prejudice and bigotry”—the right-wing kind, naturally. Dupnik has now come out and said that “We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country.”

Ignore, for a moment, the fact that both parties have made the country worse. Consider: How many generations of young people can you raise on Big Lies—the kind that teach that taking from Peter to lavish on Paul at the point of a gun creates a “better country”? That central planning, the kind that crippled the USSR, will make for a “better” USA? That bankruptcy is verboten if you are a private citizen, but quite fine if you are The State; that borrowing money you don’t intend to repay to finance welfare and warfare in perpetuity is for the “better”; that an OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) equaling your GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is good. And that the larger the parasite (government) the healthier the host (the private economy).

Sooner or later the bumpercrops of rudderless dullards we raise in our public schools will become confused and “crazy.” Jared Lee Loughner used grammar and language as metaphors for his mindlessness. After all, the words the society around him transmitted conflicted with the reality he observed. You could say that he was exposed to schizophrenogenic interactions on an ongoing basis.

Whoever said that what we commonly call insanity is a sane response to an insane situation had a point.

It is not the freedom of speech, but the perversion of speech and the inversion of morality that encourage “madness” and mayhem.

All this doesn’t mean that “crazies” that kill are not fully aware of right and wrong: they are.

We are all exposed to what I’ve described. And we are all free to determine how we react to this distorted discourse; namely to the discrepancy between words and what they actually describe.

On Grief And The Aggrieved

Crime, Democrats, Etiquette, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, our masters in modern Rome are foregoing “partisanship” (read principle) and are coming together to spend funds not their own to secure their sorry asses against the statistically minuscule chance that these royal behinds will come to harm. Curiously, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is commending House Speaker John Boehner for being “extraordinary in setting the right tone” for “a more enlightened way.”

“A more enlightened way” than what?” It’s almost as though Larson is the aggrieved party and Boehner a member of the offending group. Both parties have assumed these respective roles.

Indeed: “Republicans are clearly responding as if they feel somewhat incriminated,” said University of Michigan political science professor Lisa Disch. “On the one hand, they are acting very quickly to distance themselves from the incident, but on the other hand, they seem to be feeling as if they have been caught at something; caught at using rhetoric that is incendiary.”

On the topic of grief: A day after their child’s dreadful demise, the parents of the “9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store” were liberally granting interviews.

To me this is unsettling. We once used to grieve privately—at least initially. These days, there is nothing people will not share and express in public, and ASAP. They have no private selves.

This is part of our festering cultural commons.