If we don’t allow drunks to drive cars, why do we allow despots to drive political campaigns?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 14, 2024 – The omniscience and weight of popular media is such that Americans are unable to superimpose handed-down family traits and traditions over the clinically-designed values and mores our children are confronted with everyday.
A significant portion of popular entertainment seems designed to reinforce and buttress that classroom training. Personality and character types, drafted with input from psychiatry, sociology, and political science, can be scripted so as to be almost irresistible to young children.
Suddenly, imperceptibly, mommy and daddy seem all too human in comparison to the puppets of the Children’s Television Workshop, or to real pretend TV families, from the Ozzie and Harriet Nelsons to the K-something Kardashians.
Whereas father knew best into the early 1960s, the new American model was smoothly introduced as Archie Bunker submits to the new head-of-household role Edith and Meathead had drafted for him. Real men were impotent to resist that subtle operation because daytime and evening soap operas on TV were like vapor in comparison to the horrible reality of war in the jungle and hamlets of Vietnam.
By the end of the Nixon nightmare, the mysterious powers-that-be had dredged the first artificial generation gap – they had created the hard-hatted silent majority. Their grand children are both the people who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and who also staged “encampments” across the nation’s most elite private colleges and universities this spring.
(As a veteran of the cohort who attempted to fuel anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations on reasonable rage alone, the kids today look fully-supported by Eastern Mountain Sports, and the expensive water sector of the consumer economy.)
Since today’s best and brightest see no need to protest China’s enslavement of Uyghars, or the Islamic world’s infantilization of girls and women, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Saudia Arabia’s dismembering of jounalists, their camp-out looks phony and hollow. Besides which, it is a sad signal of ignorance when people appear to cheer for either side in an unscripted orgy of killing, a.k.a. war.
War always is wrong…
… war always is the failure of persons of good will to ensure that persons of ill will do not become so powerful that they are able to disturb the peace. If we don’t allow drunks to drive cars, why do we allow despots to drive political campaigns?
When we elect to the presidency people like JFK, LBJ, RMN, and W, we get pushed and pulled this way and that by the ace propagandists they surround themselves with. (Depressing as it was to realize how dumb W is, when proof of that was delivered by his PR flack, Blue media star Nicolle Wallace, we perked right up!)
Now, thanks to the bottomless pools of invisible cash made available by the treacherous Citizen’s United decision, politicians have ready access to enough money to convince us their mouthful of palaver is sufficient justification for the deaths of whatever number of innocent lives their bad acts will cost.
It is an accepted fact of life that fear governs human motivation; fear is the primary driver behind every program and campaign dreamt up by Team Red and Team Blue. When suitably scared, the Reds take up arms and wreak havoc, while the Blues pitch tents and play cheerleader roles for one side or another of a lethal, civilian-killing conflict.
Somehow, someway, after WWII, watered-down Marxism was allowed to seep into and poison the basic principles of American educational philosophy. Scholars attribute it to French “thought-leaders,” who may have been given the run of the place by their beleagured American counterparts, many of whom had been figuratively and literally beaten into submission by deans and chancellors with the full-throated support of the Pentagon, the F.B.I., and all local police agencies.
Through the 1960s, most private and elite colleges and universities (and charities, orchestras, museums, etc.) were administered and managed by republicans, a party then noted for its liberal intellectualism and spirit of noblesse oblige, as democrats then were noted for tolerance of racial bigotry.
The slickest example of political sleigh-of-hand took place when Sen. Barry Goldwater (R. AZ) re-annointed Sen. Strom Thurmond (D. SC) a republican. The turncoat’s defection was announced with a Tourettes-like flurry of the word ‘conservative.’ From 1964 through to the campaign of 2024, whenever a republican says ‘conservative,’ the default implication is that the person or program referenced also is tolerant of white racism.
That invisible transformation occurred during the summer of 1964, when the GOP, knowing he would be hideously whipped by LBJ, nominated for president Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. He would be the first martyr of “conservatism,” and in so doing, would extinguish the last lick of flame from the torch of liberty ignited a century earlier by Abraham Lincoln.
The original proponents of the GOP’s cynical southern strategy hooted and hollered as they buried the eastern elite governor of NY, Nelson Rockefeller, under the crap that spilled from the mouths of the embryonic Tea Party, Oath-keeper, Proud Boy, and MAGA types crammed into San Francisco’s Cow Palace. My oh my, just look how far we’ve come – all the way from a republican convention in Nancy Pelosi’s adopted hometown!
As absurd as it sounds, American academics may have been persuaded to yield to their France-based colleagues because the twentieth century-long suffering of the Vietnamese people ultimately is the fault of French Imperialism. Corporate American avarice only qualifies as a secondary, derivative influence, even if it was every bit as evil and harmful as was the French role.
Before everything began to be seen through the kaleidoscope of a caste-based fixed dialectic, freedom of conscience prevailed in America, and fathers and mothers were the principle source of the values and mores that animated the lives of their children.
But today, public policy is under the control of a leviathan of an educational bureaucracy, which is commanded by an unholy alliance of Teams Red and Blue. They may or may not have permanent control of the Congress of the United States of America, but their looting of the public purse sure makes them look like big, fat patriots, permanently in control of American life.
Even a casual reading of history will reveal that political leaders never fail to capitalize when their constituents are frustrated in their lives, liberties, and pursuit of happiness. Oddly, that is not always a bad thing – look what FDR accomplished during the frightening depths of the Great Depression.
But, please remember the unprecedented horrors unleashed by Hitler, with the same basic conditions faced by Roosevelt, but with the people of Germany and the world unprotected by anything as powerful, and as fragile, as the Constitution of the United States of America.
Bottom line must be this: When the crap hits the fan, we sons and daughters of the American Revolution must keep our eyes on the prize!