Things As They Are

If we say, for example, "the Republican Party", what is meant?  Most, we  must mean the Party that does not fight.  Whether from a lack of conviction, or from enervation, or complacency, it's not so much a one-sided fight, or a war of attrition, as a mudslide, faster than continental drift but just as universal.  Show me a revolution, and I'll show you degeneration.  What can we expect of a party? -- that it stop degeneration?  As much to suppose human nature can change.  Only individuals can change, and that, mostly, only after a searing of the soul.

I started this blog some years ago because I needed a place to express myself that was socially acceptable and unchallenged -- a volunteer audience, no peril of me gauchely intruding.  I stopped writing here some seasons ago because the tone was becoming unrelentingly oppressive, re my health and the direction of this country.  But my need to vent is legitimate.  If Job can write a book extolling his own righteousness, I suppose I, like Jeremiah, like Jesus, can weep for Jerusalem -- like David for Absalom, like Peter for himself.

The Party of Lincoln, formerly the Whigs, was one of national expansion and improvement.  No fear of big government -- but government concerning itself only with roads and canals and bridges, and those details specific to their times, such as tariffs and coinage.  A party that understood that making money is what must have been meant, by the pursuit of happiness.  Not materialism, but material turned to human purposes.  Seems, to me, an approach consonant with reality.  Because the individual is important, slavery was odious.  But this importance is honored as a function of the general welfare.  My but doesn't that Constitution have a lot of applications?

The Party of Roosevelt, TR, Progressive, is certainly Republican, as the Radical anti-slavery wing was Republican -- because the alternative was the Democrat Party, drunk like the Whore of Babylon on the blood of the oppressed, grossly pandering to the ravenous rabble.  What's that I imply?  The working man is somehow ignoble?  Please, it's not hard to follow.  The self-seeker is ignoble.  The generous is great of heart.  Thus patriotism is not about love but about sacrifice.  Takes it out of the realm of feeling and into that of action.  Feelings ... like a woman, a child ... like a Democrat.  I jest of course.  It is necessary to be complete.

So Republican progressivism attempted the individual welfare -- using the corrective power of government to correct corporate monopolism.  Monopolies will always lead to corruption and abuse, whether corporate, or labor, or government.  There must always be checks and imbalances.  There must always be a court of redress, an agent of succor, a god to oppose a titan.  What is wisdom, but an appropriate response to an ambiguous situation?  Reality has only two elements: people, and things.  Happiness lies in the balance.

Now we find an America that is unspeakably mutilated.  What nation does not defend its borders? Empires that fail in this, fall.  Nations that fail are subsumed.  In Obama's Niagara of scandals and incompetences, this latest, the Children's Crusade, is among the most shameful.  Betray us, by releasing literal disease, TB and scabies and hitherto undiscovered mountain/jungle contagions, into literally unprepared communities.  Yes, a monumental human tragedy, brought on of course by the invitation to, well, just come.  But of all the things that can be said of this, the most heart-rending is that it is unconstitutional.  Because the US Constitution, with its institutions and its rule of law, is/was the only material salvation the world has/had.  Everything else, throughout history, has been whim -- the righteous pagan's striving for harmony, answered always, as a function of the passage of time, by the passion of the barbarian.

I may speak here, I may, of such merry follies as gay marriage and recreational drug use, legalized.  My disgust has been inchoate and remains unarticulated.  If I do speak, be prepared for a jeremiad of unrestrained vitriol.  Somehow my country has ceased to exist.  Orphaned, widowed, bereft, traduced, betrayed, beaten, raped and robbed, infected, possessed by swine, vampiric, changeling.  Well, this might happen to any country.  American exceptionalism?  We are not excepted from the ruinous consequences of unwatchfulness.

If the wolves creep in and devour our children, it must be because we wished it so.  Was the night not full of howling?  Might we not have closed and barred the door?  Just as hope is not a plan, nor luck a skill, neither is regret a remedy.  When it's too late, the only vigorous action is revenge, which is not the redoubt of a noble spirit.  Passive acceptance, resignation, perseverance under duress ... examples of varying edification to future generations, but no remedy for present evil.

Evil is the word.  What have you done?  What have you done?  You should have fought.


J