My Friend Vlad (Part the Third… and the Final)

I’m really not anxious about “reader volume” this time.  I almost hope that today’s post passes completely unnoticed.  I didn’t want to write it: I wrote it because I had to.  And I wrote parts of it in excessive haste or with excessively tropological sarcasm.  I did that because I wanted to finish.  I feel a spiritual nausea coming on this morning as I review the weeks that brought us here.  And with the luminous “holidays” at hand… oh, yes, the holidays!  Like anyone else, I want to weave an insulating cocoon around my wife and son and me for a few days.  I’m indeed grateful for the opportunity offered by the calendar.  For the rest of it, for the “Happy Holidays” emails from people I haven’t seen in decades… damn them all for pitiful fools.  And damn me for seeing more than was intended for fragile human eyes.

To those who have posted or may post comments, thank you for your time and attention.  Thank you for having the stamina to look long and deep into some of the darkest pits imaginable.  I haven’t answered any of you, and I don’t imagine I’ll be doing so—not on this subject.  I just want to get it out and leave it behind.  Maybe you’re better fortified against the pit than I am.

In the rubble of the former United States—in “Unmerica”—national elections will be as meaningless as plebiscites in the proverbial banana republic.  On the ballot is Your Beloved El Supremo and… and Salinas, Chacón, Gasparo, Dominguez… “We’re a democracy, you know, amigo!”  That’s your new standard, your “new normal”.  Enjoy.

This isn’t to say, however, that there will be no resistance.  Far from it.  On the local level, resistance will now flourish as never before.  As I suggested in this essay’s previous parts, the rift between Western European elite-progressive totalitarianism and the belief systems of the formerly weaponized minority masses—traditional Muslims, Hispanic Catholics, rural and blue-collar black populations—will widen rapidly now that the Nationalist Strawman has been incinerated in the town square.  The swarthy rank and file don’t like masks.  College-educated white people cling to them in adoration, but the folks I’ve seen mask-free in Wal-Mart have mostly been black males and Hispanic females.  The dark rank and file don’t want drag queens reading to their children at the library.  College-educated white people have attempted to float such quasi-moralistic claptrap as a solvent of conventional Christian values—and they’ve done so, indeed, with spectacular success, much of it engineered from within the white Christian church; but our brethren who live closer to Mother Earth (and who may actually have some of her gritty skin beneath their fingernails) aren’t having it.

We can join them to say “Hell, no!” at Town Hall meetings, and our selections of mayors and state representatives may reflect our fury.  Securing the representation of Podunk County for Montague “Poke” Mahone the Third, white socialist wonderboy (married to a Native American sociologist), isn’t really worth the cost of a Dominion-caliber voting system.  Regional elections don’t particularly interest the revolutionaries (except for district judgeships).  The central government, you know, can always crush counter-revolutionaries if it so chooses.  With fleets of drones to locate targets and Humvees of stormtroopers (now brought home from Waziristan to wage war on their cousins) ready to roll, unruly rioters in Joplin, Missouri, wouldn’t offer so much as a training exercise for “our brave military”.  Yet the optics of such beyond-the-beltway massacres and Bloody Sundays wouldn’t be good.  President Vandal ordering the execution of 8,000 black folks or of 12,000 Muslim immigrants… hmm.  Some of the state governors, at least, would begin to shy away.  Some of the stormtroopers wouldn’t trigger their cousins on cue.  The dictatorship would risk becoming a transparent tyranny.  Too early for that play, perhaps.

So what’s the next move on the board the Vandal?  If we remain in control of our towns and hamlets, how does our new master, his old master—the Puppeteer—bring us to heel?  What if, for instance, Xi Jinping, unmoved by President Vandal’s public-relations problem, orders him to pursue the sophisticated, pincer-like vaporization of ringleaders on a hit-list?  What if, for that matter, Chairman Xi insists on offering the assistance of thousands of PLA stormtroopers, who have no cousins on these shores and are well rehearsed, besides, in clubbing and bayoneting women and children in Xinxiang Province and Hong-Kong?

I have been somewhat glib in trying to paint the scene in broad strokes… but I promise you, it isn’t excessively reductive to represent life under Unmerica’s new (first?) president as life in one of Xi’s satrapies.  An article posted by Peter Helmes drops the names of a few European billionaires most intricately involved in Western civilization’s overthrow.  They don’t sound terribly Chinese.  H.J. Schellnhuber, Stefan Rahmstorf, Ottmar Edenhofer, Claudia Kemfert, Uwe Schneidewind; Gerd Müller, a chief architect of Angela Merkel’s paternalistic oligarchy; Frithjof Finkbeiner and his son Felix, creators of “Fridays for Future”, “Scientists for Future”, and the ongoing Greta Thunberg fiction in general; Dr. von Hirschhausen and Maja Göpel; George Soros, of course, “who with his thousands of non-mandated NGO’s” influences global politics significantly… such are the figures that a savvy European analyst would associate with the Club of Rome, and that are more often denominated as the Davos set on this side of the pond.  “But who is the strategic godfather of all these ideologues?” questions Helmes.  “Standing at the hierarchy’s peak—far above even Bill Gates and David and Richard Rockefeller—is the Canadian multi-billionaire Maurice Strong”… and Strong’s ties to Communist China are indelible, if not purely Marxist.  Beyond the Strong family’s commitment to a dictatorship of the proletariat (as interpreted by a dictator) nestles a pathological hatred of evolved human beings, as if we were far kinder to the planet when we were apes whose life-expectancy scarcely broke twenty years.  And if Bill Gates doesn’t reduce our minds fast enough (for time is of the essence) to that lemur-like state with digital exo-intelligence and injections of uncertain content, then… well, there’s always the termite model on Xi’s drawing board.

It’s beyond my ability—and, frankly, little to my taste—to autopsy global conspiracies.  My brush does broad strokes only.  To me, the ultimate godfather of megalomaniac takeover in our time isn’t Soros, or Gates, or Strong, or even Xi Jinping, but rather the same culprit as gets up to such things at all times: Satan.  That’s why no blessed meteorite just happening to drive Xi’s skull ten miles below the earth’s crust would really solve very many problems for very long.  It’s also why a President Vandal, if miraculously rid of the worldly creditor who owns his carcass, would have that sorry hide auctioned off to another master within a week.  In a way, none of this matters.  If Judas were not to exist, we would have to un-invent his brother in our mirror. 

Yet until we reach eternity, the day we occupy is always this single shriveled day—this minute of this hour.  We are here and now.  On this day and at this hour, it’s Xi Jinping who would rule the universe.  He’s the present Mao, the present Genghis Khan.  Likewise, our senile President Vandal, a grifter and a bravo by nature and by trade, is Xi’s hired tough at this moment; so our children, on this day of our Lord, need protection from this domestic despot who serves that global tyrant.  The succor we seek would be Heaven’s from the Evil Domain if the hour had come for every man, woman, and child of us to join hands and enter the Light at one step.  But since this particular hour is only engraved with the names of a few (as the next hour will have a few more, and the next a few more), let us see if another man like ourselves—in the image of Jesus casting the shadow of Judas—might be persuaded to save a child here and there.  Let us try to act rather than merely curl up and die

Someone like Vladimir Putin could be our man.  Oh, he’s no saint, no, and he may well be another of the Devil’s chief lackeys… but so may any one of the relatively nameless vultures who circle our civilization in high bureaucratic office.  Vlad is a dismal figure, I know, upon whom to hang any hope; but I see no other locus of earthly power anywhere who hasn’t signed away his soul ten times in blood.  Putin, perhaps, has only done so eight or nine times.

Yes, I’m aware of “the list”.  The poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinienko, the bludgeoning of Mikhail Lesin, the Mob-style hit of Anna Politkovskaya… it’s hard to imagine Dante’s locating Putin anywhere better than intermediate Hell.  But… well, maybe intermediate Hell will have to do for now, since the jackals slavering over our children are all pouring from Satan’s mouth in Hell’s Pit.  We santini who can’t sully our hands in anything morally equivocal—such as incarcerating traitors or executing murderers—may have to contract out our enforcement to the nachalnik of contract killers… or else watch our children be devoured.  The truth is… well, the truth is this: men such as we should never have sired children.  We weren’t men enough to stand up and kill our children’s killers.  We just sing hymns.  So here we cringe… and here lie our children with their throats bared to the knife.  And there’s Putin (and in yesterday’s shadow, the Mossad, and—once upon a time—a CIA not yet neutered by careerist bureaucrats).

If Putin himself is soon taken from the scene by his mortality (and, please God, may Xi and Soros and Gates not be far behind!), then another Russian nationalist of his stamp would do.  Imagine a Putinesque premier, offered harbor privileges in Texas or mineral rights in Oklahoma or an automobile plant in Alabama.  Such a high-profile collaborator in American enterprise would be hard for the Vandal and his Beijing masters to reject on “moral” grounds; for Putin is ostensibly of their plundering swarm, and is already doing a ripping oil business with another hell-bait butchering despot in Venezuela.  As Xi’s most visible buddy in war games fantasizing over the annihilation of earth’s human inhabitants in large numbers, Putin has earned his own Vandal letter-jacket.  He’s a cutthroat, like the rest of the team.  I’ve admitted that.

Yet Putin, or the next Russian nationalist to replace him, could also conceivably pose a major deterrent to President Vandal’s firebombing of his own citizens.  If some of us are paying tribute to the Russian Vandal, then we’ll have every right to summon his defense against Xi’s kowtowing-satraps (and Xi himself).  For I say it in a whisper to those few who continue to follow this dark conversation: I cannot believe that Vladimir Putin loses any love on Xi Jinping.  War games?  Of course Russia joined China in war games!  Russia is something of an extra-large Taiwan in Xi’s glazed stare: how better to handle the situation than to pal with the Beijing juggernaut for the time being?  Terrify the Yanks, win a few concessions here and there (knowing that Chinese promises are written on the wind with water), peer into your rival’s arsenal, get to know your rival’s tactics, let your rival believe he’s stealing similar looks into your sanctuary… it’s really quite brilliant.  Quite un-American, in any “post-Cold War liberal America“ sense.

Putin is a nationalist, a Russia-first bully.  He is that at the core of all his machinations and assassinations.  He’s not a communist—not of the Xi stamp.  That is to say, he doesn’t lust over visions of an insectified world swarming in indistinguishable millions before a hundred-foot gold likeness of himself.  (And yes, children, that’s communism: that’s its final, “real life” form on this sick planet.)  Putin wants Russia self-sufficient and feared enough to keep intruders at bay.  He’s a Mob boss whose passion is for the famiglia.  I know that the American conservative intelligentsia scoffs at such analyses.  Frank Gaffney and Diana West, for instance—and there are no two minds whose insight I more respect—recently underscored Putin’s communist bona fides on Secure Freedom Radio by referencing his remark about Joe Biden: that Biden would be easier for him [Putin] to work with than would Trump because Biden’s beliefs are more “Soviet” (not Russian: Soviet).  Alas, I think that interpreting such utterances at their most transparent level typifies our collective error.  I understand the remark as follows.  “Westerners with totalitarian notions readily go along with power plays that shortcut democratic participation.  Joe Biden is one of those Westerners, and I’m interested in getting the upper hand where I can.  Therefore, I’d like to work with a useful idiot who can be suckered into giving me what I want as he gleefully tramples down his nation’s conventional restraints.”  Only an ex-Soviet could fully appreciate the extreme convenience of dealing with an “American Soviet”.  Putin is an opportunist, not an ideologue.

So… say that President Vandal and his vulturine, life-sucking Health Minister Fauci (whose name means “jaws” or “maw” in Italian) were to decree that all citizens must be vaccinated with… whatever’s on the day’s menu.  (Something under your sink, perhaps.)  Say that your state refuses to enforce universal compliance.  Say that the Vandal (with Xi pulling one set of strings, and the ghoulish Life-Sucker another) makes a Little Rock moment of the situation, sending in the National Guard (SS Division) to strap people down house by house as Mengeles in training load and empty syringes.  Say that bullets begin to fly (and they would, you know).  And then?  And then?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have an Uncle Vlad looking over everyone’s shoulder?  If Xi can send in his PLA advisors, fresh from massacring Hong Kong, to volunteer assistance… why, then, Uncle Vlad can send in his advisors, too.  “Not so fast, tovarishch!”  They bring a tank, we bring an anti-tank gun; they bring a chopper-gunboat, we bring a surface-to-air missile.

I’m wondering if the state of Texas or the state of Georgia couldn’t borrow such toys from my friend Vlad.  The Vandal has all of the toys produced and stockpiled with our tax money… but now our Uncle has called the raise—and raised again.  Another dirty little secret: most of these made-in-the-USA toys are now outdated and inferior.  Vlad has better stuff, frankly.  Fifty years of subversion by the Vandal and his fellow partners and pillagers have actually left very little good stuff in our arsenal, much of that little rusted out by nameless wars in sandy deserts.  Meanwhile, Vlad may just have amassed more and better stuff even than the Chinese.  He has oil but otherwise no economy, he has an aging and thinning population (as will China, believe it or not, in just a few years)… but he also has state-of-the-art Armageddon hardware galore.  People said it was a foolish investment.  Now it’s the single game-changer on a board where Communist China occupies most of the strategic squares.

I’ll take Vlad, please.  I don’t have a nation any longer.  It dried up and blew away.  I have no president.  A disgusting, senile thug and career lackey is fumbling with the presidential seal bestowed upon him by the most inhuman regime to pollute the planet since Genghis Khan’s reign.  I have no flag.  I have no anthem.  I salute nothing of this world any more, because this world no more acknowledges the rights given to me by God.  What I have is an either/or choice of cutthroats to invite into my home.  In that case… I’ll take Vlad.

I’ll take the Russian hit-man over the Chinese mass-murderer.  I’d rather be a dog who eats at the bony carcass after the Russian wolves have their fill than the two-billion-and-forty-sixth ant in Precocious Boy’s ant farm, his weary eye following all our movements through a glass panel as he decides which tunnel to collapse before supper.  I’m learning Russian, not Chinese.  And if I have to absorb a pecking-order smack to the rear of the line in order to ensure that my children aren’t tied down and infused with Gates/Fauci eugenic sterilant, I’ll take it in silence, conceding that it wasn’t fully undeserved.  I should have done more, when I still had the chance, to purge my society of the white “Christian” all-tolerant progressivist virus.  I should have been more of a man—should have unleashed a little more “hate speech” when it was due.  I hate liars; I hate cheats; I hate abusers of children and innocents; I hate self-coddling cowards disguised as spiritual illuminati; I hate egotists and hypocrites who promote “science” only insofar as institutionalism shuts down open inquiry.  I am full of hatred… and some of it is left over for myself.

So… this loathsome Vlad, this buccaneer with raped riches gleaming at his ears and his fingertips—I’ll take him, if I must have a worldly captain.  And when I can take him no longer, he may throw me to the sharks, and I’ll gratefully meet my maker.  But the conundrum, my dears—if you have followed any of this wild rant—isn’t about the Kingdom of Heaven.  It’s about how you can save some of the children you brought into a here-and-now where you allowed a trap to be laid for them… and you are not Jesus, and you do not walk on water.  You did some bad things, and you are left with two bad options.  Yours is not to pretend now that you’re Heaven-pure—not after you betrayed the children.

I’ll take Vlad.  I will certainly not take the vile, fumbling, all-fingering Vandal.  Not now, not ever.

Let Each Day’s Worries Suffice Unto Itself

Before you know it, everyone will be casting a nostalgic eye back over 2019.  Thanksgiving, incredibly, looms less than three weeks away.  Then Christmas.  Then… well, you know.

I began my year trying to do some tiny little bit of good for a fellow named Buddy Woodall, whose case was profiled in a Netflix series (The Confession Tapes, Episode 6) and who’s going to spend the rest of his life paying for two murders he didn’t commit because you can’t get a retrial for having a stupid jury.  Sorry, Buddy.

My first spring attempting to nurse along a couple of orchards (mostly pecans and apples at this point) was beset by several problems, such as voracious deer that chewed right through the protective netting I laid out… but that kind of discouragement is Life 101.  To see the republic dissolving around our ears was rather harder to take, especially since I had begun reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago for the first time, as I must guiltily confess; but then, how many “newly minted” Ph.D.s in History do you suppose have ever been exposed to a line of it?  Learning about the bureaucratic inferno that follows when God’s most arrogant creatures try to correct all of the “design mistakes” in human society, and—at the same time—watching new waves of college graduates give the thumbs-up to suppressing speech, ruining small businesses, terrorizing families in suburbia, decriminalizing crime, energizing a magnet for chronic human slavery, producing a wildlife holocaust in the quest for “clean” energy… yeah, I’ll take the sharp-toothed deer, please.

At about this time, my son had introduced me to Jordan Peterson on YouTube… and I discovered, as well, that I could only watch Jordan via streaming on clear days, since Internet out here in the boondocks has its drawbacks.  Welcome to the edge of the grid!  That’s where I said I wanted to be in retirement, so… así es.  It was Peterson who nagged me into reading Solzhenitsyn.  Somewhere along the way, I also blundered into Diana West.

Diana West… American Betrayal.  All I learned from this book was that FDR’s insuperably pompous idiocy was undergirded by a thick layer of Soviet operatives (over 500 strong), that Japan would never have bombed Pearl Harbor without the sabotage of skillful diplomacy from D.C. (but I already knew this from Herbert Hoover’s Freedom Betrayed), that Harry Hopkins engineered the passage of heavy water and uranium by the ton to the Soviet Union via Lend-Lease, that our beachhead in Italy established after tremendous loss of life was abandoned because Stalin didn’t want us straying through Eastern Europe, that the carnage of D-Day was indeed owed entirely to FDR’s servile submission to Uncle Joe’s will, that most of the Jews exterminated under Hitler could have been saved had Moscow not dictated our foreign policy, that Hopkins and his fellow Roosevelt-puppeteers ignored the pleas of Admiral Canaris and other high-ranking Germans to assist their overthrow of Hitler, that our government actually left upward of 20,000 American boys (mostly freed from German and Japanese prisons) to rot in Stalin’s gulags without a peep… all of the foregoing—all of it—to court some kind of “convergent” ideological marriage with Stalin’s totalitarian insectification of humanity.  Also know as progressivism.  And West scarcely hints at the Russian role in garbling our Japanese negotiations as the war wound down, such that the dropping of the Bombs was deemed necessary by Truman when it could easily have been averted.  The construction of the Soviet Empire demanded that competitors for territory in the Far East be cleared off the board.

How much truth can one man take at the age of sixty-five?

Meanwhile, as summer morphed into fall (a summer that was supposed to have warned us of “climate change” with its record number of dry days and high temperatures—followed by a fall that has come crashing through with unusually cold, wet vigor), I watched my one-time heroes in Congress leave a slimy collaborative trail straight to the sidelines as the jackals gathered around the President.  Andrew Napolitano, Ben Shapiro, Jonathan Goldberg… Ben Sasse, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz… we’re not talking Mitt Romney here: these are (were) persons of premier intellect and character.  Where are the snows of yesteryear?

In my bid to live within the limitations of HughesNet, I discovered the Podcast; and there, much to my delight, I further discovered Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio, along with Tom Fitton’s Freedom Watch and Sarah Carter’s mostly fluff-free broadcast (that’s a compliment: I hate fluff, Mssrs. Crowder and Hunter).  Trouble is, I was once again plumbing the depths of “truth overload”.  How many days in a row can you hear that Communist China is well on its way to preparing an insect farm for us idiot Americans as we supply all the raw material (à la FDR Administration)?  Personally, I am thankful to the Democrat Party for helping me to view my exit from this world with equanimity, and even great joy, as I enter my final laps… but I have a son.  The rest of you have children and grandchildren.  Is Hell big enough, deep enough, to contain as many Judases as busily engineer our ruin?

Sarah Carter opined yesterday (in a days-old broadcast that I played during my workout) that we have lost the ability to make up our differences and be civil to each other.  Bless your gentle heart, Sarah… but the party who always had to clam up at faculty gatherings or family reunions was yours truly, not the legions of virtue-signaling exhibitionists around him.  The incivility sits almost entirely on one side of the table.  It’s the same side that wants to leave unwanted babies to die after a failed abortion, to lavish taxpayer dollars on criminal vagrants, to reward child-molesters and slavers with free entry into the country, to let small entrepreneurs starve if they won’t kneel at the altar of “LGBTQ Pride”.  There’s no middle ground where one can pitch a tent and meet with purveyors of such moral atrocity, whether their service to chaos is deliberate (Harry Hopkins) or arrogantly unwitting (FDR).  We have no coherent society left.  We have California, expelling its toxic influence into neighboring states the way wildfires are eating their way across its own townships.  We’re in nuclear meltdown.

I need to get up now and go unwrap my brave little orange tree: I need to find out if she survived last night’s onslaught of “global warming”.  And then I need to haul my potted bell peppers back out on the porch—for today is clear and sunny.  These howling apes in clothes can go about their business of destroying everything their ancestors created in population centers all over the world.  If HughesNet permits, I’ll publish my not-so-uplifting ramble for a few eyes in a few parts of the world where Internet isn’t yet severely filtered.  Tend to your gardens, brothers and sisters.  They won’t betray you—even the deer won’t undermine you—if you bend your stiff neck and study how they grow.

“Corrupted Mind/World Interface”: The Black Plague of Our Time (Part I)

When Diana West finally mentions Herbert Hoover’s Freedom Betrayed in her recent expose of FDR’s Soviet-infused administration, American Betrayal, she seems much less impressed by the book than I was.  “Hoover doesn’t explain the shift in thinking” (she writes) that left the Western world—from the Washington press corps to Winston Churchill—scrambling to obfuscate Soviet atrocities like the Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Polish officers.  Hitler was the only evil on earth: Stalin’s satanic regime was forever being rehabilitated for public—and personal—consumption.  The number of Ukrainians systematically starved under Stalin (and a lieutenant named Khrushchev) during the Twenties would roughly equal the tally of Jews later gassed by the Reich, and ample news of ongoing slaughter throughout Russia leaked out in the decade before the war. Nevertheless, Soviet communism was being patiently window-dressed long before Stalin’s assistance against Hitler was deemed necessary.

It is in this part of her deeply unsettling tome (about two-thirds through) that West raises the subject of “convergence” in detail: i.e., the theory that Western democracy and Eastern collectivism would harmoniously merge if our side bent to meet their side.  In an arrogant naïveté of stupefying magnitude, Roosevelt seems to have answered William Bullitt’s warnings about the USSR as follows: “Bill, I don’t dispute your facts, they are accurate.  I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning.  I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man.”  Bullitt summarizes FDR’s attitude as “the vice of wishful thinking,” a phrase embraced by West.  And it’s a good phrase, but…

But I nonetheless have the feeling that Diana West herself comes short of providing a full motive for what James Burnham, many decades ago, called the “suicide of the West”.  Infiltration of academe by communist operatives, check; penetration of the news media and the state department by Soviet moles, check; infection of the intelligentsia by the utopian theory of convergence, check; but… but what else?  Nothing deeper?  Manipulation by malevolent external forces, seduction by a beautiful design that looks good on paper… but why is the design seductive?  Were those who so admired it smoking something that had been smuggled to them, once again, by malevolent external forces?  How much of our folly can we blame on master-spies?

It’s still going on, after all.  It’s happening every day.  I don’t think the “vice of wishful thinking” was distilled into my erstwhile minister’s misty brain by a covert operative when she was blaring that the desire for borders is mere “xenophobia”.  (Yes, I’ve changed churches.)  There has to be some other reason why so many of us are so susceptible these days to childish delusions of such dangerous proportions.  Doesn’t there?

My own theory is that something potentially fatal happens when a culture begins to lose touch with basic physical reality.  Marxism views the Industrial Revolution as a watershed stage… and maybe the Marxists, like a broken clock, are right sometimes by accident.  I, too, think the abrupt deracination of long-settled peoples from the land and their all-but-forcible (fully forcible, in Red China) transplantation to urban centers lies somewhere near the cause’s root.  The sun no longer shines upon you throughout the day.  You never again drink rainwater delivered by a clean brook.  You don’t know the calls of various birds, or which call signals danger and which a change in the weather.  You can’t identify a single constellation at night—hell, you can’t see a single constellation from most of these smoking urban crypts.  The exiled millions no longer possess the kind of wisdom embodied in their parents’ proverbs.  They don’t understand that “work is a great teacher” or that “the product of a man’s labor is his praise” (to cite a couple of Irish samples), as simple and earthy as such knowledge is.  Instead, they learn that they must conserve their energy when performing servile chores for a paltry wage, and that only strength in massed numbers can resist the power of wealth and privilege.

The Industrial Revolution made human beings less human.  It shifted our species from the apex of Nature’s pyramid and fixed it firmly within a termite mound, where a few queens were served by thousands of nameless minions.  It crushed individuality while promoting conformity; it suppressed the free enterprise of the village’s clever artisans while spawning a ruthless kind of capitalism that largely predetermined the big winners.

That’s right, I said it (and, for some reason, it remains a highly provocative thing to say): capitalism, far from being a synonym for free enterprise, turns out to be its mortal enemy in the evolved, high-tech economy.  Most of us haven’t come to grips with this; as a society, we certainly have not.  We exhort our children to hurl themselves into mind-numbing, soul-killing careers after college (“Just be glad you found a job!”) and expect their generation to discern generous latitude for freedom and creativity in this arrangement.  We ignore, most likely, the wreck in which our own careers left our higher ambitions.  We seem to think that writing code to keep Amazon from being hacked is something like cutting and stitching good leather saddles or laying chimneys that will last a century.

And it’s not just a change in the spiritual quality of labor (the “despiritualization” of labor) that has fueled our corrupt taste for escapist fantasies—our “vice of wishful thinking”; the very feel of stone in the hand is alien to us, and the very scent of a horse in harness.  We’ll laugh and exclaim, “Well, I’m glad I don’t have to smell that horse’s calling card out in the streets!”  No, we don’t have to smell much of anything that’s unwelcome.  If the woman at the desk next to ours wears too strident a perfume, we’re apt to complain to the boss.  As for those flies that followed horses as mold follows deadwood… Pascal once mocked the philosopher whose airy speculations are ruinously disrupted by a little buzz at his head.  Do we even comprehend his reference any more?  Our air-conditioned spaces have banished noxious insects.  We ourselves have grown as artificial as the indoor climate we have created.

Of course, here I write about the twenty-first century’s white-collar bureaucrat, not about a Joe in overalls carrying a lunch pail.  But we have ever fewer of those Joes: their grandsons… they are us.  The Industrial Revolution has produced so many machines to perform so many purely manual tasks that those who still have jobs tend to be punching keys rather than rivets.  Our grandads were merely denied a view of the stars: we (and especially our children, if you’re my age) don’t understand the intricacies of the manually dialed “land line” phone.  The stars?  They’re those destinations where faintly green humans with pointed ears speak elegant English to Captain Kirk’s boarding party.

We’ve become practical idiots.  Why learn to change a tire when you use Uber most of the time, anyway?  What’s a washer?  All that turning on and off of faucets… Siri or Alexa handles that.  A torn shirt, a worn-out shoe?  Search Amazon under “apparel”.  (Or is it under “clothing”?  The other word might be confused with “app”.)  Hungry and don’t want to go out?  Order pizza.  Health-conscious?  Google Home Chef or Magic Kitchen (or, better yet, download the app for future ease if you’re industrious).

I don’t say that we are idiots.  Obviously, we’re technological whiz kids.  But we are perfect imbeciles where the rubber meets the road (in a cliché I last heard during a Firestone commercial thirty years ago).  We have no significant connection with hard labor—with sweat, bruises, dirty fingernails, gardens smoked by a heat wave, poured concrete ruined by a flash storm… we inhabit a bubble the reinforcement of whose artifice is usually the source of whatever good jobs remain.  Ortega y Gasset wrote almost a century ago that modern man (and he says hombre masa, our ordinary Joe) lives in greater luxury than the Sun King did four hundred years ago.  The emperor of all that he surveyed was still using a chamber pot less than two centuries ago: a kid raised in the Projects today scarcely catches a whiff of his effluent before he flushes it.

What has this to do with embracing Stalinism?  Why, everything.  It explains why we can embrace the “relief” of communism (no more unemployment, job interviews, performance evals, or constant competition) without sniffing its ordure (no more creativity, novelty, individuality, personal success, or free expression).  We don’t understand how reality works—how it really works, off the drawing board and down in the shop (where assembly is now robotic).  Our parents once learned something of human nature early on by reading great novels and plays in high school; now a phalanx of utopian evangelists from Education programs force-feeds us on the “narratives” (i.e., the monochrome, cartoonishly stereotyped struggles) of women fighting the patriarchy or Sioux orphans caught in the White Man’s world.

Once again, when I say “we”, I’m thinking especially of our children. We learned little enough about the great wide world, and now they have learned less than nothing (enough, for instance, to think that every tornado signifies climate change).  I should really devote a second commentary to the pathological consequences of exile from hard reality that I see in their miserable ordeal (and I truly commiserate: they didn’t ask to be dealt this hand).  I’m growing rather long for one morning.

Let me break off this half of my analysis, then, by stressing that we and our fathers—and, indeed, our grandfathers—were already suffering from the progressive disorder of “corrupted mind/world interface”.  (Of course, the pun in “progressive” is intended.)  Is it entirely accidental that Woodrow Wilson was an Ivory Tower eremite?  It may indeed be accidental that he ended his kingly administration almost as a vegetable, with his wife running the bluff of competency for him; but then, just a couple of stops down the road, we have the wheelchair-ridden FDR, prince of all practical idiots.  His anemic puppeteer, Harry Hopkins, was so debilitated by mysterious and chronic ill health that he arranged the rise of the Soviet Union mostly from his bed in the White House.  I’ll leave the state of Barack Obama’s mind/body interface to your imagination.  He apparently could lift a golf club and a basketball; but his “hands off our token half-African treasure” upbringing was certainly no initiation in the school of hard knocks, and his very fuzzy orientation to family and sexuality… no, I won’t go there.

Remember, though, that the real subject of this speculative study is the electorate that advanced such people.  It’s us, and our children.  It’s my (until recently) minister, older than I; and it’s the offense-detecting dynamos who dissolved into ungovernable indignation five years ago when I lightly quipped to a class of college seniors, “I hope the homework doesn’t drive her to suicide.”

No, we don’t behave—collectively—like normal, functional human beings of ages past.  And there has to be some other reason than that Boris and Natasha have laced our drinking water with hemp.

No, Maybe America Wasn’t That Great… Thanks to the Left

I’ve only finished about half of Diana West’s American Betrayal.   Hardly know what to say, what to write.  I can’t claim to have been taken entirely by surprise: I read the suppressed memoir of Herbert Hoover, Freedom Betrayed, when it finally slipped past the academic security guards of our society’s Temple to FDR (after a mere fifty-year delay).  The single most shocking revelation in that work—largely a compilation of communiqués from inside sources, with Former-President Hoover scarcely doing more than setting the scenes—was that Roosevelt had blurted out his resolve to force Japan into “unconditional surrender” at Casablanca because… because he was tired, and Ulysses S. Grant had popped into his empty head.  Old “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Yes, that’s documented by a Roosevelt aide.

After reading what West has to say about the tight circle of Soviet agents around FDR, I now have to wonder if the Casablanca gaffe wasn’t planned all along.  That vignette about doing a sleepy waltz with Grant’s initials… could that have been no more than a cover-story for a deliberate misstep that left Churchill aghast? I recall hearing on some PBS documentary years ago that Stalin’s people, just before the Bombs were dropped, deliberately sabotaged an attempt on Truman’s part to arrange Japan’s capitulation.  Obviously, Stalin wanted the Empire of the Rising Sun entirely out of the picture as he contemplated his personal conquest of the world—and, just as obviously, he wouldn’t have minded if we’d lost another million men in an invasion of the islands.  As for the A-Bomb, Uncle Joe may also have known that its deployment was the more likely next move: maybe he just wanted to see if the thing worked.  Thanks to Harry Hopkins, the “brains” behind FDR’s administration, the Soviets already possessed tons and tons of heavy water, Canadian Uranium, and other essential hardware (along with all necessary top-secret plans and manuals) to create their own Armageddon Arsenal.  West reveals that Hopkins had been using Lend-Lease for years to pass Stalin every high-tech instrument of death our war machine could grind out, even when our own troops were in grave need of supplies and materiel.  Roosevelt repeatedly rubber-stamped all such ventures aimed at making the USSR a First World power.

Roosevelt was the premier pompous idiot ever to occupy the White House, Stalin the most ravenously insane mass-murderer ever to get his hands on a weapon, Churchill the most tragically obsessed luminary ever to set loose ten monsters in his pursuit of one… and Harry Hopkins the most lethal spy ever to slip under the radar.  One might add Joe McCarthy as the most dedicated patriot ever to be crucified by his countrymen and their posterity. These are my own conclusions, but a mere half of American Betrayal validates all of them except my judgment of Churchill (whose “appeasement” of Stalin—Winnie’s own word—is adequately chronicled by Hoover).

West notes that Truman seemed to have a particular interest in discrediting McCarthy (just as he actively explored prosecuting Whittaker Chambers): a reflection, she speculates, of his “promote the Democrat Party above all else” ethical system.  As I’ve tried to note along the way, not everything in the previous paragraphs is drawn from her book—a fact which renders her verdict much more credible to me, though I don’t know why she never cites Hoover.  I have no doubt, having seen several of Diana’s talks and interviews on YouTube, that she’s fully, even painfully aware of the impression her work leaves upon people like me: people, that is, who want to believe—who grew up believing—that their nation was the world’s beacon of freedom until the Sixties and the Vietnam debacle toppled the lighthouse.  Now we have to face the horrid truth, not only that our Greatest Generation was exploited to clear the way for the communist takeover of half the planet (a thesis long ago hatched by Pat Buchanan—and shouted down from all directions), but that Stalin’s butchery of somewhere between twenty and forty million of his own people was fueled by Lend-Lease.

FDR, that Peerless Idiot, facilitated the gruesome murders of approximately one hundred million human beings, if we toss in Mao’s carnage as a “ripple effect”.  (And, of course, we know without West’s reminding us how effectively Truman slapped down MacArthur’s bid to snuff out Chairman Mao.)

It all puts the slogan, “Make America great again,” in a whole new light.  It inclines me, even, to agree with the slavering hounds of ideology who bay safely from their ivory-tower kennels that the USA was never so very great.  Instead, we’ve been a constant patsy for the likes of them: those brainless, baying hounds, and especially their billionaire masters hiding at the far end of the leash.  We’ve borne the gonfalon of evil through both hemispheres—not when our ancestors came looking for wood and furs and found native peoples eager to involve them in bitter local rivalries, but… but, you know, those other times: the time we let Stalin steer us into war with Japan, the time we supplied Stalin with tens of thousands of tanks to overrun Eastern Europe, the time we underwrote the railroads that would transport millions of Stalin’s own footsoldiers to Siberia (if they retreated too soon or not soon enough), the time our own CIA let Castro’s thugs nest deeply at our back door rather than crush them at the outset… some beacon we’ve been.  Some hope—thanks to our irrepressible leftwing elite.

Yet I find that this very general, very brooding reflection carries me, in the oddest way, toward… well, yes, toward a kind of hope.  Before now, I had believed that the Sixties undid us, with a little ground-clearing in the Fifties (a preparation West considers in The Death of the Grown-Up).  I had supposed, as well, that our cultural death-spiral had a distinctly accelerating quality, such that the hedonistic Eighties look downright gilded and homely as we watch our lobotomized youth today puzzling over which restroom to enter.  But no, wait: the illness has been incubating for much, much longer.  It’s been around for over a century, if one traces it back to Woodrow Wilson’s rabid progressivism.  It crops up even in the late nineteenth century, in places like the Pledge of Allegiance authored by “Christian socialist minister” (as Wikipedia is pleased to call him) Francis Bellamy—a bit of statist brainwash whose intent was to immunize schoolchildren against the Tenth Amendment.  Some wild man on Parler hurled names at me for days when I volunteered that information: an excellent example of how insidiously this pathogen works its way into our national sinew. Evidence of subversion, sanitized by a complicit Establishment, becomes an occasion for patriotism within a few short decades.

If you were a doctor and you were told that an accident victim had lost a pint of blood in five minutes, you’d figure that death was imminent without immediate action; but if you learned, instead, that the same blood had needed more than an hour to spill out, you’d be much more optimistic.  Our nation, it turns out, has been getting drained by ideological vampires for a good five or six generations now, not just a couple.  It’s a miracle that we still have any vital signs… but maybe we’re stronger than I tend to think.

Our educational institutions, for one thing (as Bellamy’s case shows) have been under assault for a very long time.  As a career educator myself, I have been inclined to believe that classroom propagandists were not, on the whole, carrying out some kind of secret subversion for which teacher colleges or grad school had primed them.  I’m more of the opinion that there’s a self-selecting anti-conservatism in any profession devoted to “training minds”—for why wouldn’t you want to “train” young minds to run a little better (where “better” is never clearly defined) than minds of the past?  In the same way, few people who commit their lives to reporting news, probably, hold the view that there’s nothing very new under the sun.  If the day’s little events matter, it can only be because, once again, reacting to them properly may make the human condition “better”.

Without entirely surrendering my “self-selection” theory, I admit now that such progressivist predispositions can exist side by side with deliberate conspiracies to subvert the social order.  (Yes, I wrote “conspiracy”: the disqualification of the word from having any serious real-world value is itself the successful outcome of a propagandistic conspiracy.)  The good news is that specific groups have indeed been executing a specific plan to turn our free society into a hive.  The news here is good because it offers us the possibility of isolating and criminalizing these destructive influences: we’re not looking at some sort of suicidal impulse hard-wired into our socio-cultural DNA.  The bad news… well, the bad news is that the body politic is very, very sick.

My present ramble isn’t the proper platform for uplifting certain recommendations, but I will finish with a single one.  We must save free speech. Our right to state our view is guaranteed first of all among the Bill of Rights’ original ten.  Those who abuse a teaching position to advocate refusing that right to any individual or group should lose their job.  Those who operate media dedicated to public discussion should be stiffly punished for censoring opinions.  Whether the school or medium is publicly or privately funded should be considered irrelevant: my home was not paid for with taxes, but certain features of it are still required to meet safety codes.  No one whose job is to instruct impressionable minds should seek to impress upon them the permissibility of stifling adversarial views.  No one whose service is to facilitate the free flow of ideas should seek to channel or filter that flow.  Lawbreakers should be identified according to explicit guidelines (it’s not hard to tell when A is trying to shut B up forcibly), and they should pay a stiff penalty for attempting to sabotage one of the primary values upon which American society—or any society that views people as autonomous individuals, not insects—is founded.

We haven’t been as great in the past as we’d thought; and as a nursery for window-smashing stormtroopers who wield “hate speech” restrictions like a nightstick, we have become the very opposite of great.  Let’s forget about “progress” for the moment.  Let’s try to get back to where we were when our general moral outlook was good.