So the previous 10 days emerged from some thoughts I had while reading the late L. Neil Smith’s wonderful collection of writings on liberty, Lever Action. I imagined a series of letters from a re-education gulag after the eventual triumph of the folks who want to “transform” our way of life. (I’m not thrilled about the title “Letters From After.” Maybe “American Epilogue”?)
Specifically, the series grew from a comment Smith made in 2000 about the then-leaders of China:
“…it’s worrisome to deal with a handful of geriatric bastards who know they won’t have to live with the consequences of plunging their nation into total war.”
I started musing that perhaps we should consider the motivations of the seventysomething and eightysomething tyrants who are running the U.S. ship of state into the ground — the senile and not-so-senile so-called leaders who cling to power with the fervor they once accused their adversaries of clinging to guns and religion — the basket of deplorables who seek to reshape America into a collective utopia and to hell with individual rights.
Is it so hard to imagine they could dispense with “cancel culture” and simply round up the wrong-thinkers?
Are they callous enough to aim the ship of state into the rocks knowing that, like the Chinese Communist leaders of 2000, they won’t have to live with the consequences? Is this administration the final act of a generation of collectivists who would rather leave chaos behind than a free and open society/
The Old Guard who ran China then and the Old Guard who run the United Soviet States of America now have much in common. They believe they can run the lives of millions upon millions better than those individuals can rule themselves. Or wait, do they even care about those people in the first place, as long as they are the ones lording over the rest of us? There has always been a distinct air of “Do as I say, not as I do” about them, because they consider themselves above the scrutiny of whom they consider lesser human beings. They have become wealthy on tax dollars and sit in their mansions or fly around the world burning the fossil fuel they would deny the next generation, calling US deplorable and making assumptions about “the common folk.”
OK, enough musing about real and imagined dystopia. Back tomorrow with something different.