Peace, Equality, And A Free Lunch -A Political Goody Bag For A Credulous, Gullible Nation

Shakespeare made the gullible mob famous - Mark Antony was able to get the crowd on his side with a silver tongue.  So were Coriolanus and Jack Cade.  The mob is fickle, blows with the wind, hasn't an original thought in its head, can be cajoled, manipulated, and molded in any form, is untrustworthy, gullible, and ignorant. 

 

Alexander Hamilton knew this and argued with populist Thomas Jefferson not to leave governance to the majority who will always vote not their conscience but their pigs, their chickens, and their marriageable daughters.  At the very least create a buffer between the leaders of government and the unruly mob. 

Jefferson agreed, and we have a Senate, but Hamilton is turning over in his grave to see how this hallowed upper chamber has become just as venal, vacuous, and selfish as the mob.  Democracy itself is the problem.  There is no way that when the fractious, marginally intelligent people elect representatives no different from themselves, the republic is no different from a barnyard of bellowing, braying animals. 

Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest, but he lived in a much more privileged, anointed time.  With the civility of Parliament, the judiciousness of the House of Lords, the good sense of the British people, and the civilizing mission of colonialism, he could afford to limn the praises of representative government.  

If he were alive today to see the chaotic, ungovernable mess Great Britain has become - an inchoate, identity-obsessive, fractious place - he would rue the day he ever considered democracy to be the best form of governance.

Margaret Thatcher did her best to preserve the first principles that underlay the British and American system of governance - small government, private enterprise, patriotism, low taxes and individual freedom - and Ronald Reagan followed suit.  There might be some hope for democracy after all.  

The fall of the Soviet Union showed the world the intellectual corruption at the heart of communism.  Francis Fukuyama declared 'the end of history', and all nations looked forward expectantly to a universal era of peace and prosperity. 

No dice.  The world simply fragmented.  Yugoslavia came apart.  Muslims, long restive, burst out of their political somnolence and unleashed Islamic terror on the world; and worst of all neo-progressivism, a distorted, febrile, adolescent version of the foundational principles of Brandeis, Gompers, and LaFollette, gained ascendency. 

If the world was to be such a contentious and predatory place, the corrupt, distorted progressive view of faux kindness, goodness, consideration, and compassion of these intellectual charlatans was to be the anodyne.

Reagan and Thatcher resisted and said that Charles Darwin had taught us a much more fundamental lesson. Survival, prosperity, and longevity depended on competition - the survival and dominance the strongest, the best, and the brightest - but the virus of progressivism had already spread too far to stop. 

Conservatives were far more intellectually and philosophically sound.  They understood human nature and how it fueled the world's interminable wars and civil conflicts.  There had been only two extended periods of peace in the world - Pax Romana where the Roman Empire exerted complete, absolute control over the territories in conquered, and the Cold War where a nuclear standoff and the fear of mutually assured destruction kept fingers off the trigger.  Other than that, five millennia of war. 

Liberals, however, in a chillingly calculating way knew that despite the irrefutable lessons of history, the ineluctability of human nature, and the ever present fuel of Darwinism, people were still basically dumb, credulous, fickle, and profoundly gullible.

Any thinking man might assume that socialism as a political theory and vehicle of governance would never again be considered.  After all, once the Berlin wall came down and the West was finally able to look inside the Communist empire, everyone could see the rot, the crumbling infrastructure, the empty shelves, the spiritless anomie, the concentration of abusive power, and the angry futility of the people. 

However, American progressives were smart.  All this might be true, they said, but the foundational ideas of socialism were still current, salient, and good.  It was Stalin who corrupted the dream, the dream itself was still valid.

Most importantly these progressives understood the perennial, absolute gullibility of the masses, idealistic to a man, given to the most preposterous visions of harmony, equity, and communality, and unable to think for themselves. 

Slowly but surely these progressives built a political movement which called out so-called capitalist greed, elitism, cronyism, and the immoral concentration of wealth.  Elect us, they said and we will level the playing field, take from the rich and give to the poor, welcome all comers, and govern with consideration, compassion, and good will.  There are no such things as enemies, just nations which have not yet seen the light of cooperation, compromise, and fellowship. 

The fact that such fantastical propositions have never worked or even been operational didn't matter.  Progressives chose to overlook the glories of Western civilization brought to the world through expansionism and power.  They chose to overlook the law, art, literature, science, and philosophy created thanks to kings, emperors, shahs, and shoguns and focus on colonialism, patriarchy, and monarchical rule.  The time for such exclusivity is over, they said, and a new world of progressive, inclusive governance is upon us. 

Vote for us, they said, and we will make America a model of socialist values, humanitarianism, and emotional prosperity.  We will reorder, reconfigure, and reform the American socio-economic system so that the people will benefit from affordable food, clothing, energy, and housing.  The government will oversee programs to give to the people what they require and what they desire free of charge. 

Finally a free lunch, 'From Each According to His Ability, to Each According to His Needs', a more compatible, harmonious society of equals. 

The American people fell for it hook, line, and sinker.  They bought the promise of this treacly offering saw the Second Coming around the corner.

 

As much as conservatives demanded a return to the foundational principles of the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment before them; and as much as they pointed to the failure of socialism, the truth of Darwinism, and the invariable, hardwired traits of human nature, their words were ignored. 

It gets worse. Not only are the principles of socialism once again being promoted and promised, but they are being applied Soviet-style in New York City and soon will be implemented in Washington, DC.  The mayors of both cities have said 'equality will reign', the rich will be punished for their greed, the poor will finally get their fair share, the white privileged minority will be shelved, dismantled, and marginalized in favor of a universally multicultural society, and city services will be free for all, as they should be. 

Who could resist such fairness, justice, and largesse?  Why pay for the subway, exorbitant prices at the supermarket, and high rents?  

There is not a scintilla of doubt that that the most prosperous and productive residents of the city will leave for warmer, more congenial climes along with their employment and their taxes; that the city will go bankrupt and ask for federal bailout, and will become as derelict and authoritarian as its Soviet forbears. 

Yet Mamdani and DC Mayor-Elect Janeese Lewis George bang on with their reformist programs, punitive taxes, and reverse-racist policies.  It will not end well, but the credulous, gullible, mob loves it.  Life will finally return to normal without the predatory capitalists, land developers, filthy rich contractors and landlords, and elitist financiers. 

It takes two to tango, but in this case, the people lead. If it weren't for the people's ignorance and inability to think, the likes of Mamdani and George would never see the light of day. 

We are exactly as Hamilton understood - the unwashed, the uneducated, the fickle, the unschooled, the credulous, the stupid, and the gullible. 

A conservative is in the White House but the outcome of the coming midterm elections is uncertain and liberals may gain seats in Congress.  Europe and South America are other stories. There ultra-conservative parties have prevailed, and socialism, progressivism, and liberalism will soon be things of the past.  Unrestricted immigration of those who are anti-Christian, anti-democratic, and anti-West finally forced Europeans to see the light. 

Americans have no such cause celebre to force them back to reality. They will have to put up with the political charlatans they have elected, take the consequences, and then throw them out.  Better late than never, but the damage will have been done. 

Third Time A Charm - Serial Divorces In Fly-By-Night America, The Saga Of A Good Catholic

Melanie Fallon grew up Catholic.  She received her first Communion, was confirmed, and went to Mass every Sunday.  She believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Holy Trinity, and the eternal salvation of the Catholic faith. 

Observance and respect for the canonical principles of the faith were never questioned.  Priests after Ordination were the sanctified priests of the Church in a direct, unbroken line to the Pope and through him to Jesus Christ himself.  Baptism, Penance, and Extreme Unction were tenets of belief that could never be challenged. 

 

Holy Matrimony, the sacred bonding of man and wife was also a sacrament.  Divorce was not only permitted, it was a mortal sin, condemning the sinner to eternal hellfire. 

For a young girl like Melanie, soon enough after Confession and the Eucharist, the marriage contract with God was imminent.  She longed for a perfect union which would reflect the divinity of the Holy Family and the sanctity of all families, and hoped that a man worthy of such spiritual aspirations would soon appear. 

Spirituality and moral perfection are rarely items of an ordinary sexual life. Although the image of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus are always in the Catholic's mind at first, it is quickly forgotten in the heat of passion.  Good girls always marry bad boys.

Melanie was one of these girls who had an irresistible urge for the ragamuffins of her cohort - the boys who had none of the proprietary decency urged by Father Brophy, who had been called before the principal time and time again, for whom the possibility of reform school was real and imminent, and who had a desultory, but infinitely sexual allure that could not be denied. 

Never a tart, certainly not a 'loose woman', Melanie simply followed her heart's desire and that led her to bed with Archie Taggert, Billy Fitch, and Armie Bellini, all relationships quick, uncomplicated, and without consequence.  They were part of her own string theory, seemingly unrelated men linked in stochastic patterns. 

Melanie continued taking this train with its local stops until she was an adult, professionally employed and gainfully engaged in serious pursuits.  She was one of Scientists for Social Responsibility's attorneys, charged with aggressive legal action against racial discrimination and for the welfare of the black man. 

She was not enamored with the field of eligible men in her office or in The Movement as a whole. They were a rather diffident, uncertain lot, so trained in the 'No Means No' philosophy of Women are Precious that they were timid, fey, gayish  lovers; so she went out of bounds to continue her sexual escapades.  There was Harlan from Treasury, Axel from Commerce, and a host of others met at the Old Ebbitt Grille, the go-to singles bar for up-and-coming Washingtonians. 

Melanie was a practical woman with her feet firmly on the ground.  Her sexual adventurism was not reflective of her old, Catholic-inspired desire for marriage and family, so she soon turned her attention to vetting, triage, and sorting.  She was not looking for or expecting an arranged marriage, something calculated on the basis of economic stability, professional promise, and decent fatherhood, but something like it. 

A girl in her position was not about to choose a mate willy-nilly and suffer the consequences later.  God forbid she should end up with the throwback Philly Roberts, married to her colleague Fanny Macintosh who  married wrongly assuming that a patrician pedigree - Beacon Hill, Nantucket, Biarritz, and Gstaad - would carry her through.  After only a week or two of dungeonlike medieval Arab torture she realized that she had married a camel-driver. 

For Melanie Mr. Right No. 1 turned out to be sly and untrustworthy.  How he confected such a fictional but quite impressive pedigree was a thing for the record, but Melanie beat herself silly for the ignorance and bullheaded stupidity which led her to his bed.  Finding a mate was not worth the caricatured charade of a so-called marriage, she concluded, empty-handed. 

'Patience' she told herself.  'Patience', but her biological clock was ticking and approaching Doomsday so she had to 'get on her hurry stick' as her mother used to say, be quick about it, and find a suitable husband before it was too late. 

No. 2 was little better than No. 1 and she not only was beginning to doubt her judgment and ability to sift the grain from the chaff, but kept having niggling thoughts of Father Murphy, the harbinger of the good tidings of happy marriage, the union of man and woman in the sight of God.  Two divorces, compounding her mortal sin and classifying her as a single woman desperately afraid of spinsterhood. 

The third time was a charm.  Bentley Adams was an ideal husband - attentive, respectful, kind, and considerate - and it took Melanie little time to find out that he was a crook worse than Bernie Madoff, Jefferey Skilling, and Rudy Kurniawan combined. Before the ink was dry on the marriage contract, he was hauled off to federal prison for a 20-year sentence for fraud, embezzlement, and intellectual property theft. 

'Where have I gone wrong, Father'. Melanie asked her confessor, Father Murphy, her old pastor who now in his nineties refused to give up the confessional, the consecration, and the fight for Christian salvation.

The old man, now barely able to see over the prie-dieu in the confessional, across the screen and into the life of the penitent before him, listened with equanimity to Melanie's confession of moral dissolution but abiding faith.  Hearing perhaps every third word, he only surmised sexual deviance, serial divorce, and a repentant desire.  

That was enough, he thought, but the penitent across the screen wanted more. 'What should I do now?', she begged, but the old priest who had only a string of love affairs with altar boys and seminarians in his past and with no clue whatsoever about the va et vient of normal heterosexual life, demurred. 

'Jesus loves you' was all he could manage, instructing her to say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys before he shut the screen and closed up shop for another Saturday afternoon. 

Now, Melanie was one in a thousand - a woman who actually wondered about the supposed sanctity of marriage and the admonishments of the Church.  How could the Catholic Church so obstinately harp on the divine nature of marriage and the hellfire damnation of divorce when marriage was nothing more than a cosmic crap shoot?

She had screwed every Tom, Dick, and Harry who had shown her any interest but had not given up on the hope of a good marriage, a home in the suburbs, children, school science fairs, barbecues, and neighborliness. 

America was a sinkhole of depravity, she concluded, a viper's nest of dangerous liaisons, and women were their victims.  Where was the determination, courage, and devil-may-care challenge of Eve in Paradise? 

Melanie, like most women, was caught between the Scylla of propriety, duty, responsibility, and good will and the Charybdis of horniness and assertive female sexuality. 'Fuck 'em', she wanted to say to all men, but somehow was constantly and ineluctably corralled by the likes of Father Murphy. 

There was no No. 4.  That was beating a dead horse. She had tried her best to serve God and Man and had come up empty on both counts.

So be it, no one is perfect.  At least she tried at existential harmony, and that was something. 

She was last seen on a Tampa Bay beach on a chaise lounge with a sundowner, alone but far from unhappy.  Once one unpacks the trunks and gets rid of the detritus, life is a pleasure.   

Amulets, Grigris, Charms, And The Evil Eye - The Voodoo Of American Democracy

Amy Stall was a frequent traveler to Haiti - that is, before the country's descent into social chaos and during the quiet time of the Duvaliers, five star Petionville restaurants, all night dancing in Carrefour, and the African markets of Duvalierville. 

 

Amy did not go to Haiti for the restaurants, the music, lambi creole and the tropical beaches of Les Cayes, but for something else - the dark spirits of voodoo, zombies, and the Baron Samedi. There was something both frightening and potent about the ceremonies in the hills above Kenscoff, the savagery, the possessions, the invocations, and the ecstatic revelations that were irresistible.

 

For Amy religion in America seemed tame, ordinary, predictable, unimpressive, and unmoving.  The closest it came to real power was the consecration of the Catholic Mass - the mystical transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ but only a metaphor. Real sacrifice was held on the Mesoamerican plains where virgins were sacrificed to the immanent gods of the surrounding mountains in a plea for sanctuary. 

As a child she had filed into St. Maurice's church and suffered through the bells and incantations of the Mass, the Kyrie, the Offertory, the Confiteor, and the blandishments of old Father Murphy whose voice trembled and trailed off and his hands shook as he gave communion, 

She had left the Church, its canon and its pale belief, and for years, searched for something more meaningful, more heart-throbbing - that is what women were supposed to feel when seeing Christ on the Cross - something more spiritually rendering. 

She turned to Protestant fundamentalism and its charisma.  Jesus Christ visited the Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday in Aberdeen, Mississippi but he never offered to be her personal savior.  He was just as remote and fictional as the Jesuits' God. 

It was much later, when she was a traveler to Africa did she have her first glimpse of real religion - the tribal, animist religion of the forest, the savagery described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness, the descent of man into his most primitive, but thereby bringing him closer to divinity.  Not the congenial, welcoming, loving divinity of Christianity, but something far more essential.  This was fundamentalism, not the stage version of Pastor Isaiah Phillips. 

She began wearing the amulets and grigris given to her by African priests whom she sought out in the same Congolese forests where Kurtz thought he had found his salvation.  She had been an observer of the same inchoate, primitive rituals that Conrad had seen, a privileged visitor because of some animal sense felt by the Africans or because she was a white woman, a goddess in the forest myths of Ngomo

This forest odyssey was just the beginning, for it was Haiti and voodoo which had captured her interest.  Somehow there she would realize her longstanding evolutionary passion - to see God. 

She always fell short.  These ecstatic revelations belonged only to natives, those who were born and raised within the spirit of the gods, djinns, and evil spirits. The Turkish nazar would not protect her from the Evil Eye no more than the shrunken ear of a Congolese devil could.  She sniffed at the hems of limitless power, the primeval forces of the jungle, the heart of darkness and divinity, but could never be embraced by them. 

Amy was a seeker, a person of heightened sensibilities, optimism, spiritual hope, and endless patience. God was there somewhere, and with deliberateness and single-minded virtue, she would find him. 

Tolstoy was such a seeker and explored every avenue which might lead to God without success. History, mythology, science, philosophy all failed him.  Either God did not exist or he was ineffable.  He ended his search exhausted and dispirited but calm.  If tens of millions of his fellow men believed, and if hundreds of millions had believed before them, then perhaps there was something there. 

Such religious seekers are often secular ones.  The transference of inescapable passion for truth from the divine to the secular is not uncommon, and has been extensively chronicled.  The phenomenon is particularly American wrote Professor Amadeus Wilson historian and social biologist who wrote in the Duke Medical School Journal of Forensic Psychology:

The American Seeker is a person of emotional febrility - burning with eschatological passion and secular reformism who sees no distinction between the primal energies of religious ecstasy and the achievement of practical goodness.  He does not see, he feels.  The world is very much the territory of djinns, spirits, and the daily incarnation of the gods.  He is just at home in a revolutionary meeting to change the world as he is walking up aisle to embrace Jesus Christ.  Both sides of his brain emit the same irresistible energy.  In psychiatric terms, he is doubly troubled

Amy Stall was the poster girl for Professor Wilson, for she had joined the progressive movement not as a substitute for her religious hejira but as a complement to it.  When she was amidst a crowd of true political believers, all were filled with passion for the climate, for social equality, for economic justice, and expressed their ecstatic passion in ways no different than the peasants of the Kenscoff hills or the tribal faithful of the Congolese jungle. 

As importantly, these political seekers see evil in the world, real, palpable, and incarnate.  There is such a thing as the devil and he, not the sentient, calculating Devil of Milton, but the horrific demon of the Amazon and the Central African jungle is here now and everywhere. 

It wasn't the political progressive canon per se which was the fuel for her passionate embrace of social reform. It was the almost mythical communal ecstasy of true belief.  The impending climatic doom mattered less than the embrace of the idea as a path to epiphany.  As Amy stood amidst an almost hysterical crowd of climate activists, all who unquestionably believed in the coming Armageddon, she was filled with the same ardor, the same soul-filling happiness of revelation. 

Sympathetic political observers say that this ecstatic expression of political belief and commitment is a good thing, for without passion, ideals founder.  The warriors of the Crusades marched across Europe to Jerusalem under the flag of Christianity.  Their mission was holy, their purpose divine, their war sanctified.  Modern progressive activists are no different, infused with passionate belief, with complete faith in the rightness of their cause, and an undying fidelity to the holy canon of reform. 

Professor Wilson wrote further on secular religion:

The political True Believer is a person apart, detached from rational exegesis, logic, understanding, analysis, and reasoned conclusion.  He is no different than the Mesoamerican peasant ecstatic as the blade pierces the breast of the inviolate virgin, or the Salem burgher filled with God himself as the apostate goes up in flames, the African who dances around a fire in an invocation of tribal spirits, or the voodoo priest holding the headless body of an eviscerated animal. 

More telling, he went on, passion becomes hysteria and hysteria becomes viral.  There is no stopping it once it gains currency and traction. 

Any Stall never read Professor Wilson or gave a thought to such academicism. 'I am The Movement' she said, 'And The Movement is Me!' and with that she finally fulfilled her expectations, her dreams, and her desperate religious needs.  God and Jesus Christ disappeared, supernumerary distractions from the real purpose of being - making a difference, doing something, doing good. 

Professor Wilson concluded in this way:

Just like the mental patient interned at St. Elizabeth's' the True Believer loses all sense of touch, feel, sound, and smell of the real world and inhabits a much happier, elegiac, and ecstatic place.  Both are happy in their own way, unable perhaps to function in the real world, but for them social accommodation is the farthest thing from their minds. 

For the True Believer just like the religious saint, there is no opting out; and Amy Small continued in her march to a Utopian progressive future without fail or fatigue. She was and would be a soldier in the crusade for a better, verdant, and more compassionate world forever.