They Could Not Stem The Tide?
I have not posted in this space for a while. I have been busy setting up editorial pages and starting a walking tour from the Francis Marion Hotel that will cover sections no one else thought to do. I am in the middle of designing the pages, the tour, walking the route, seeing things I have never seen with eyes that have seen so much. It is a gratifying experience – one that I am able to use all my faculties.
Thus, I am excited and optimistic. My whole life, I have been trying to bundle all my meager talents into one package: writing, film, Internet and history. It is a tremendous opportunity.
I am also enthralled by a woman whose very voice floods me with a positive resonance. She shares my vision (although not my politics), she encourages me to write. We have seen each other for a year. I’ve talked to her on the phone more than I have spoken with anyone else in five years. It’s better every time.
What’s exciting to me is that at age 56, I feel my whole life is ahead of me. At a time when most are getting ready to slow down (or were, anyway), I feel the world could be my oyster.
Yet, I am afraid. For the first time in my life, I have true misgivings about the direction my beloved country is heading. I am not the only one. Picking randomly from the headlines, CNBC anchors are calling for a Tea Party. Five state legislatures are defining conditions for secession. Today, Barry has been president for month.
I have sat down probably six or seven times to write about something in the past week and a half. I would get four or five paragraphs, then put it down for minute (right!). A few hours later, when I came back, the information was outdated.
It was all bad news. All of it was filled with incompetence, malfeasance and class envy. What hit me the most was Jerome Corsi’s assertion in WorldNet Daily,” The American public is largely unaware that the true deficit of the federal government already is measured in trillions of dollars, and in fact its $65.5 trillion in total obligations exceeds the gross domestic product of the world.”
This is suicide!
Or murder: On September 18th of last year, our entire world as we know it almost ended. According to Tyler Durden writing in the blog Zero Hedge , “On Thursday (Sept 18), at 11am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there.”
Who did this?
Nationalized healthcare was slipped into the stimulus bill without debate. I won’t go into the relative nightmare this will engender. I will just say this is an issue that should have been debated and has absolutely no business in a stimulus bill.
If I were in charge, I would have concentrated on getting oil from the ground. It would have provided a lot of jobs and would have alleviated a lot of fears.
The thing is, our attention span is so short that we forget how close we were to disaster last summer. We are trying to catch a chimera: The illusion that is life has become but a delusion that lets us think we can dance with the devil and walk away when the music stops. The trouble is, the music’s gonna play for a while and it will be a combination of gangsta rap and polka music.
My friend from Maine came down for a bit over Valentine’s Day. We agreed on a news blackout and (for the most part) kept to it. I was much calmer. I had a great perspective on my life.
One reason I think we get along so well is that our conversations last for hours. We sit out on the back porch and laugh a lot. We also discuss what’s happening.
For months, we have been talking about how things are happening so fast that no one person can pick up on everything. When you do, it threatens to overwhelm you. After all, no one Congressperson read the stimulus bill. Senator Arlen Specter didn’t even know about the health provisions in the bill.
It’s just too much.
My friend began talking about Mark C. Taylor who wrote The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture 3 (2003). One thing she took away from it was Taylor’s assertion, ““[w]e are living in a moment of unprecedented complexity, when things are changing faster than our ability to comprehend them.”
They are. Today I spoke to a dear friend and business associate who told me he had a terrible cold and only worked, took care of his kids and slept for three days. After he emerged, he turned on the news. The market had plummeted. Obama’s (Read Pelosi’s) agenda was becoming law. So much had happened in three days, it was hard for him to process what had occurred.
My friend is one of the most optimistically cynical people I know. He has always been able to joke me out of my angst over the world. He has always believed that, in the long run, it would be okay.
Not today. Today, there was fear and anger in his voice. It was a tone I have heard time and again. The train has come off the track and the true America — the people who get up every morning and use their education and their professional acumen to put food on the table — are starting to realize the ship has listed severely to the Left.
Our wealth has been drained away in a torrent of socialism. Even Newsweek proclaimed, “We are all Socialists Now.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), said of the stimulus package, “Never have so few spent so much so quickly to do so little.”
Out on the back porch, the sun glints brightly on the fluffy clouds. I watch my friend flip her blond hair and smile. She shows me an article a colleague wrote in a law review. She begins to explain it to me. As she sees my face glaze over, she laughs and states, “Basically, our government, our country, is being taken over by street-level bureaucracies.”
Now home, my friend is busy. She travels long distances and does not listen to Limbaugh or NPR. She takes delight in music. Her news blackout continues.
I did not tell her that North Korea is going to test a missile that can hit the Lower 48. I did not tell her that Iran has enough nuclear material for a weapon. I did not talk about the fact that Pakistan has allowed the Taliban an entire province or that Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, was freed or that a secret base was exposed by the mainstream media. I did not mention my apprehension that a nuclear Pakistan controlled by Islamists is my worst nightmare come true. I did not tell her that Oregon was going to tax mileage.
I can hardly process it. I can see why many who pay no attention to such things have no idea how bad things have gotten.
They will. Soon they will walk into the brick wall the “street-level bureaucracy” engenders.
I don’t think the people who invested their lives in their dreams, visions which allowed our better angels in the form of ingenuity and productivity, will put up with that Brick Wall. Who is John Galt?
It won’t be long before there is a backlash. I hope it washes over the incredible mistakes made by the Bush Administration and all of the wretched nonsense Obama and Pelosi have foisted upon us.
Last week, I went to a conservative think tank meeting at a gallery on Lower King Street. There were 20 to 25 people sipping wine, eating strawberries and discussing the virtues of capitalism. There was a good lecture that amounted to preaching to the choir, but as I sat there and listened to the man, I thought about how we take this kind of thing for granted. We have the right to assembly.
It would be inconceivable to us that somebody would walk by and phone in a seditious charge. Maybe the camera would catch us as we entered (see CHICAGO MAYOR VOWS: 'THERE WILL BE A SURVEILLANCE CAMERA ON EVERY STREET CORNER IN CITY'...). This sounds over the top and would have been unthinkable even three months ago. Yet, in the month since Barry has reigned, class envy and race have become front and center. All the Muffys who thought they were voting for a post-racial society have plopped themselves in the middle of epithets. The administration should be careful in playing up the whole white guilt thing.
Just remember, what was legal today, can be illegal on the morrow. For all we know, it could be already. No one has had the time to read the bill to see if it is or not.
I don’t think it has sunk in how powerful this bunch in Washington is. If anything happens, the government can close things tight as a drum. Think not? When Obama flew around on the country’s dime this week spending more in two days than four or five truly wealthy people will make in their lifetimes, he stopped in Arizona.
When he announced the mortgage myth, there were over 500 protesters in Mesa. The media paid no attention. Therefore you knew nothing about it. The mainstream media is complicit.
I hear the word “revolution” bandied about more than I am comfortable with. I think there will be massive turnouts for protests and marches. These will be educated, accomplished people. Hopefully the revolt is a peaceful one — the revolution of 1848 — not 1917.
I remain optimistic. If nothing else I have the love of a good woman, something I realize I never have had. That’s all any of us have – each other. Together, I suspect we might turn this ship around without blowing it up.
What do you think? Honest to God, if you have gotten this far and think this piece has merit (or not), please send it to all you know. I don’t make any money from this. I really want to know what you think — be you from Charleston, Lexington, Ky, Portland, Maine, Washington or Arizona. I honestly want to know where you feel our future may lie.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go research the Helene Curtis Lounge (Fine women for your pleasure) on Burns Lane. God knows what’ll happen while I’m gone.
February 21, 2009 at 3:25 am
Up that to SIX legislatures defining grounds for secession, none of which are of the old Confederacy. Texas, we have heard, seems prepared to use some of its reserved sovreignty over stray bullets from the open conflict south of the border (not Pedro’s) between the narco-terrorists cartels and what presents as honest law enforcement under the dictates of martial law.
Were that some of the headlines did not bear resonances of Tom Clancy novels or hints of Hal Lindsey’s magnum opus.
February 21, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Instant obsolescence of worldview, revelation of geopolitical wizards behind curtains, the notion that fleecing the ignorant amounts to accomplishment, the cry that ridiculous spending will not save us from the hole created by ridiculous spending… I don’t think anyone is happy with the state of things. There is the suggestion that we will not see (depending upon how old one happens to be right now) the level of prosperity that we have become accustomed to again in our lifetimes. That prosperity was fake and unsustainable.
David, I hear your alarm at the suggestion of healthcare for all, but I don’t understand how the best healthcare in the world benefits those who cannot afford to access it. As things are, it is difficult to get an appointment with a practitioner in a reasonable length of time, or to find a doctor who is accepting new patients. My step-daughter has been prescribed (at times) a course of treatment for which there is a $9000 MONTHLY charge. Like so much else, this is not sustainable. I suppose I rank as some kind of communist for suggesting that the obscene amount of money that is SKIMMED OFF THE TOP TO SUPPORT PAPER PUSHERS WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DENYING TREATMENT is near criminal. We in the United States spend more for less care than those in other “developed” nations. God forbid I should lose my right to “choice” in regard to healthcare.
How is sucking more oil going to solve anything? Oil is a finite resource. If our concern is longterm (GENERATIONAL THEFT), perhaps we should act now to change our energy generation and consumption.
It does appear that, at any time, half of us will always be in an uproar. I recall feeling, during the Bush administration, the same kind of alarm at erosion of our rights. Freedom of misinformation seems to be intact.
I am traveling on the alarm train right along with you…in a different car. What a mess.
February 21, 2009 at 3:54 pm
David,
I can’t write for squat, so I forwarded your article to my wife….and she express’s so much my thoughts and does it so well….much like yourself…Her response follows:
Very interesting. So many points. They need to pass some sort of law that will limit new legislation to readable lengths. And he’s dead on when he says that no one can take in all this “information” and remain sane. I notice the “good woman” limits her news intake. It’s becoming more and more difficult to function, and it strains every aspect of our lives — our jobs, our relationships and our psyches. I can’t say that one party’s answer is more effective than the other’s, but we all know (except, perhaps, the legions if American Democrats) that the Democratic party’s agenda has always been socialism, which will insure the end of America as a prosperous nation at the helm of the world. Revolution? Perhaps. White flight? Most definitely. While much of Europe has been socialist for years, the difference is that European individuals still possess a large amount of daily freedom, which vanishes by the hour in the US. I say we choose our country now, storm in and blow up all the natives, then go about setting up a new society where freedom reigns, honest work is valued, and intelligence is fostered and encouraged. But wait, that’s been done before. Such is life. We begin with ideals, we create with intelligence and compassion, we flourish, and someone begins to squawk. The squawking becomes louder and louder and the idealistic, educated, compassionate society members pull out while the squawkers trample everything that’s left into the ground. And it isn’t even the province of humans to destroy. The Minoan society was successful, inventive, creative, female-ruled, peaceful, and wiped out in entirety by a volcanic eruption and tidal wave. The “universe” rewards neither the higher-end societies nor the lower-end, much as old-growth forests are ravaged by fire to make way for the scrappy saplings. Change is everything, and it’s rarely fun.
At 08:42 AM 2/21/2009, you wrote:
February 22, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Secession? Did ya see what Lincoln did with matches? President Hussain has nukes, Comrade!!!!!!!!
February 23, 2009 at 12:55 am
I think all of this is wonderful.
I find it hard to believe that so many normal folk are being drawn into discussion and also speaking out about the fundamental issues of life with such passion. Comments invoking wisdom from other cultures, from human history, from physics, political science, ethics, concepts like freedom, the psyche, female-rule… this all makes me quake with excitement (and I’m not a Quaker). This is such a rich conversation. I feel like the chickens are finally coming home. Maybe not to roost, but at least they are coming home. At the same time, I don’t hear many of you coming up with a view of the future that you would want to live into. The comment about succession never works. We can’t fix anything by leaving. That would be like fixing a marriage with divorce. The problem goes away until we relax and decide to get married again. Then the problem returns again until we choose to have a look at it.
The comment about how we create a society with intelligence and compassion is positive. However, most of the people who created that society (founding fathers, the Greatest Generation) knew quite a bit about sacrifice, risk and most of them had some sense about the meaning of the word “Providence”. We can learn from them for sure. However, times have changed and to just go out and risk one’s life in war may no longer be the ticket we have to ride either.
One thing we could surely learn from them is that there is a higher dimension to life that tracks and guides us if we gain the courage to quiet down and listen to it.
We must take it to a personal level. As below, so above. Furthermore, to suggest that some leader in the Whitehouse can lead the way is to suggest that you and I would, in fact, call forth a Big Daddy who can lay down the law and force quietude on the nation. This would be the compliment to Socialism… Totaliterrorism. Just as capitalism (the stock piling of assets) finds its compliment in communism (spreading the weath around to the community), what would the compliment of Socialism be? A strong, enlightened leader? And can we embrace that? If not lets look in a different neighborhood for the answers. Let’s look perhaps in the neighborhood of the individual. What is an individual? What confers personhood? How can one live so as to model the integrity, vision, compassion and committment needed to create that world?
I love David’s blog and so I am starting my own blog on Word Press: georgedrexel.wordpress.com in order to keep from diverting too much steam from this, more political blog…
In this conversation I plan to discuss ideas from Jefferson, Franklin, the Native American cultures, anamism, quantum physics, mathematics and such. I think that there are fundamental ideas which we as a culture could gain greatly from if we can pick up the pieces and start making whole understandings, stories that we can live into (metaphysics, mythology). Among others, one key point of inquiry in order to see the way forward, I think, will come from taking a stand about the value of each individual. David disagrees. (See his Hamas comment on my blog) I think that each person is of value to the whole. If we start with rock solid commitments as this assertion and live into them, I believe we will begin to create a sound new world where people know their worth and respect themselves. If you take issue with my statement that each person is of value then quite possibly you would also believe that the end justifies the means… or that we have to eliminate everyone that doesn’t agree with us. Just banging for the hood.
No matter if we take issues such as abortion, immigration or privacy, all of these ideas and a million others broach the question of what it means to be an individual? In physics, we might ask: what is a singlarity?
Let’s keep discussing these great ideas. Let me leave you with one of my pet ideas: if, as Einstein claims, there is no point which is stationery, couldn’t we then conclude that each point becomes a stationery point from which to perceive movement. We started with thinking that the earth was stationery. Then we learned that the sun is stationery. Now perhaps we could claim that each person is a circle whose center is a stationery point and whose circumference is everywhere without collapsing into relativism. If any of you want to intuit where I might be heading, or issue me a warning, I’d like to listen.
Change is fun if there is something changeless at the core.
Swing low, sweep chariot.
February 24, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Read it and weep:
The Death of the West, by Patrick Buchanan
Slouching Toward Gomorrha, by Robert Bork
The Coming Economic Earthquake, by Larry Burkett
The proverbial chickens are, indeed, coming home to roost.
March 5, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Daniel, Barry may have nukes, the collateral damage is damning and we’ve a branch of legal thought regarding illegal orders. The oath has these troubling bits about protecting and defending the constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic… how do you accept an order from outside the chain of command to nuke New Hampshire perhaps?
marganonymous, “I don’t understand how the best healthcare in the world benefits those who cannot afford to access it.” It was a d*mn site easier to write off the cost of therapies for folks that couldn’t pay ‘ere health care was enumerated as a “right”. The folks that can afford to access it DID pay for many that couldn’t afford it, though that largesse now must appear, at least, to flow from DC, inside the holy beltway and the manse of mammon.