I haven’t been posting much commentary lately. It’s been a busy summer, with commissioned work and other projects which I will be unveiling soon.
If you read this blog with any regularity, you probably know where I stand on politics. For the last twenty years I’ve posited the notion that both ends of the political spectrum have gone off the rails, to no avail. The so-called great divide grows wider by the day.
Republicans continue to be deaf and dumb to the blithering idiot in the White House. Even the Midwest farmers are finally understanding that Trump’s bull-in-the-china-shop diplomacy is a disaster. The Chinese will wait out the tariffs until the election, if they don’t end up pulling another Tiananmen Square and getting boycotted.
Trump hopes he can stop the bleeding by cutting taxes even more and browbeating the Fed into dropping interest rates to zero. Good luck with that.
On the other side, the Democratic hopefuls continue to make wild promises that even they know they can never keep. If the plan is to gut capitalism, their proposed spending frenzy will certainly accomplish the deed.
No one on either side talks about the growing national debt, or the looming pension shortfall. Ben Franklin was right: Freedom is owning a press, especially if you can use it to print money.
There is always hope, even if all seems lost. I’ll continue to argue for national reconciliation from the middle. It is still there, believe it or not.
Stay tuned. It’s going to be a bumpy year.
Most of the time the only thing you can hear is the constant yapping of Trump and his lapdog followers like Todd Juvenal. There still are rational conservatives out there, somewhere… http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/andrew-sullivan-the-limits-of-my-conservatism.html?fbclid=IwAR22St76Kw4WDKEVG5CCMDMKc0eGuVUGQIpYd0WEl7MFgkIDapyjyTTqu44
Mr. Sullivan presents his objections to social change as being a justified political push-back against a forced radical time line imposed by the far left, which he then blames for the radicalization of a conservative reaction-ism. In doing so, he claims that the far left is attempting to push a sense of perfection, rather than focus on the “doable”, as he calls it; going so far as to state that it is the left who are engineering a wholesale change in the ethnic makeup and gender equality of American norms.
Well, I’ve got news for Mr. Sullivan…the changes taking place in societies across the globe are not the doings of evil followers of Marcuse, but the natural order of succession that comes about, especially when a nation attempts to create “a more perfect union.” People like Juvenal cannot blame their repugnant behavior on the left wanting them to change too fast. And this is certainly not about either the slow, but inevitable, change in our ethnic majority, nor the fact that gender equality is far overdue. People like him will continue to drag their feet for reasons of self-aggrandizing bias and bigotry and having little to do with the speed at which they’re witnessing that change. In actuality, and counter to Mr. Sullivan’s assertions, these are changes that are just now reaching their zenith after generations of conservative resistance; not, as he posits, the radically sped up demands of a crazed left-wing conspiracy.
Slowly, but surely, whites are becoming the minority, here in the US. That scares people like Juvenal, who are more than aware of how minorities have been treated in the past. And women are well on their way to social equality; something that the less-progressive in our society are also struggling with. But neither of those things are happening as a result of any left-wing political agenda and there’s no way any political movement can stop them.
It’s just the way it’s going to be.
All speculation at this point. I understand how utopians are drooling at the prospect of completely revamping the country into a quasi-socialist state. With President Froot loops today declaring himself the Chosen One, it seems like anything resembling human could knock him out of Washytown, and they may be correct.
Still, I’m betting that if the progressives win it all it will only last two years before another political upheaval. Capitalism will not go quietly into the night.
I agree with Bob. Chris, no one is going to bulldoze the Todd Juvinalls of the world into submission, this is just going to be an unpleasant messy mess for quite some time. Demographics are surely a thing, but asymmetric and subversive minority populations are rarely put down without a grueling fight. Better to find a clumsy third way that keeps everyone fed and the billy clubs in their holsters. Ask Rebane, he’s still paying for the horror of a 10-year-old being strafed by Axis and Allied fighters coming at him from 3 directions, trapped in a shattered outbuilding.
I’m not really sure how my post can be read to mean that I think the Juvinalls of the world must be forced into submission. I thought I had worded it to be taken as just the opposite; that it is NOT any political group forcing it’s agenda on another, but rather the natural order of things to come. As a matter of fact, I said exactly that, “not the doings of evil followers of Marcuse, but the natural order of succession that comes about, especially when a nation attempts to create “a more perfect union”.”
I advocate no covert actions on anyone’s part; just the opposite: sit back, relax, and watch the natural progression of the human race ignore the gnashing of conservative teeth in it’s sometimes abbreviated, but always forward, movement.
As I said, “It’s just the way it’s going to be.”
I wasn’t as clear as I’d hoped to be Chris so please allow me take another stab at it.
I wasn’t suggesting that you would be the one willing to drive the bulldozer but that there are others on the left who are already sitting in the bucket seat, revving the engine.
Just sitting back and watching the American demographic tsunami and resulting mayhem is counterproductive to the goal: a peaceful transition to a more truthful nation, where “all men [humans] are created equal … endowed by their Creator [self-defined] with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The point is that we all need to actively and aggressively find a way forward, working together in agreement to mutually “suffer” in the middle ground, leaving the bayonets and bulldozers behind.
Cartoonist Nick Thorkelson on Marcuse—
https://truthout.org/articles/while-combating-trump-we-must-set-our-sights-on-total-liberation/