With regard to war:
• I disagree with you when you say that war is a “necessary” evil, but at least we agree war is evil.
With regard to elections:
• “Which is the lesser of two evils?” is the wrong question. “When will we stop choosing evil?” is the right question.
I spent part of Saturday morning watching/listening to Ron Paul, one of the remaining major voices in defense of liberty, and Dan McAdams interview Jim Bovard, another of the remaining major voices in defense of liberty, about Bovard’s new book Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, and another part of Saturday morning starting to read the book.
I have gotten away from reading ebooks, but I didn’t want to wait a few days for the book to arrive, so I bought the Kindle version.
Bovard has a knack for speaking truth precisely and concisely, and the fact that the print version of his book is 395 pages long speaks to how much there is to say.
Here are some nice tidbits from the first chapter:
“Every recent administration has expanded and exploited the dictatorial potential of the presidency. Former President Richard Nixon shocked Americans in 1977 when he asserted during a television interview: ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ But Nixon’s slogan is the Oval Office maxim for the new millennium.”
(Bovard goes on to list examples from Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden.)
“Elections are becoming demolition derbies that threaten to wreck the nation. Historian Henry Adams observed a century ago that politics ‘has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.’ Nowadays politics seems hell-bent on multiplying hatred. Enraged activists are increasingly tarring all their opponents as traitors. Many of the protestors who spent years vehemently denouncing Trump were not opposed to dictators per se; they simply wanted different dictates.”
“… Americans are more likely to encounter liberty in history books instead of their own lives. Many young people are unaware of bygone eras when Americans could travel without being groped, buy a beer or smoke a cigar without committing a federal offense, or protest without being quarantined in an Orwellian ‘free speech zone.’ Is the spirit of liberty dead? Almost a third of young Americans support installing mandatory government surveillance cameras in private homes to ‘reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.’”
I have 14 more chapters to go, and I suspect when I finish the book, I will be left reassured that there are at least some people who still believe in liberty if despairing that the number is dwindling to a seeming handful.
Here’s a link to the interview with Bovard.
The next time you feel bad because you think God let you down, consider the most massive misunderstanding of God’s intentions in history.
For centuries people had been waiting for a messiah, a mighty warrior king who would lift them out of slavery and crush their enemies. When the messiah arrived in his true form, most people missed the point entirely.
They greeted him like the conquering hero they expected him to be, throwing palm leaves in his path as he marched into Jerusalem, wait, on a donkey? Oh yeah, look, it’s here in the scriptures: “See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
They didn’t have much time to look forward to their new king riding into battle, because within days he had been betrayed to the authorities, who ran him through a kangaroo court and had him executed in a most horrible fashion: nailing his hands and feet to a cross and leaving him to hang in the sun.
This guy from Galilee was apparently just another rabble-rousing criminal, and the wait for the conquering messiah king would have to continue.
But …
On the morning of the third day, the true nature of what a messiah king is began to become clearer. He wasn’t a conqueror of Roman legions or evil tyrants; he was a conqueror of death itself. That wasn’t the execution of a political criminal; it was a blood sacrifice for the forgiveness of sinners who call on him. And wait a minute, he wasn’t just the Son of God; somehow he was the Great I Am incarnate.
If the people who were there, who saw and heard him speak and heal the sick, didn’t fully understand what he was doing until much later, then you shouldn’t be too dismayed when you ask God for something and he delivers something else, something unexpected, something that’s not really what you wanted. Step back and examine what happened, and you’ll likely find it was what you needed.
Anyone familiar with The Who’s brilliant song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” can figure out where this post’s title came from. I was a political junkie in my younger days — even ran for Wisconsin Assembly as a Republican in 1996, you can look it up.
But as time went on, as new revolution followed new revolution, I came to see the real truth in the song comes in its final couplet — “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” No matter who was in charge and what promises they made before becoming boss, the concerns of everyday folks continued to deepen — the inexorable erosion of freedom, the continued disregard for people’s innate rights, even those spelled out as out of bounds for the federal government in the Bill of Rights, the supposed covenant with We the People. The differences between the old boss and the new boss were purely cosmetic — alternate versions of dystopia.
One day while I was writing about the alleged choices the two major parties had put up in the 2008 presidential election and the increasing partisanship of the partisans, I had an epiphany literally in mid-sentence. I was writing, “Freedom is not about choosing the right ruler,” when the epiphany occurred! I finished the sentence: “Oh, wait. Yes it is. Freedom is about realizing that I am the boss of me.”
In other words, stop worrying about choosing the right ruler, and rule your own life.
From that moment it tumbled into place for me what Mr. Jefferson meant when he wrote that we were all created with certain, inalienable rights, and to the extent that government is not working to secure those rights, it is failing. Freedom is not granted by government documents like the Bill of Rights — we are born free, and freedoms are always in danger of being abridged, violated or stripped, and usually by government documents.
“I am the boss of me” is an exhilarating realization and a sobering one, because it means that I’m responsible for myself, and no one else is. Government agents and agencies may purport to take care of me or regulate me, but at the proverbial end of the day, it’s up to me.
I see two cranky old men who don’t realize how old and cranky they sound, and they both want to run the place.
The thing that makes me nervous is the men behind the curtain (and I mean “men” in the generic sense; we’re all perfectly aware that women can be behind the curtain, too, right, Hillary? right, Michelle?) — you know, the men turning the wheel and shouting into the microphone, screaming actually, “How dare you! Let’s you and him fight!”
The doddering old men gather believers around them and make all the believers cranky, too, whipping up imaginary hobgoblins until we can see them all in our sleep. I try to say, “But wasn’t the idea to love our neighbor?” but I’m drowned out by the fist fights and the insults and the shouting, oh the shouting, just stop shouting for chrissakes.
Yes, I know shouting works, look how much applause the old man got by shouting through his State of the Union Address, but couldn’t we all just sit down and talk to each other for awhile? By the way, which one is the dog and which one is the pony at all these dog-and-pony shows? They both were adorable when they weren’t snarling at each other.
I don’t know what it’s all about, but I know it’s not about being led by the nose by two old men who are past their prime. I know how ironic it is for me to say that — I am an old man past my prime telling you not to follow either of these angry old men who are past their prime, but listen to me, who better to judge the ability of old men than an old man? Come on, no matter how much you like Grandpa, you don’t give him nuclear codes. Where are the able kids to come take the wheel? Whatever happened to, “It’s time for a new generation”? This is embarrassing.
Which lie will win the race? Which angry old man will dodder across the finish line first? Will it really matter in the end? Are we so far down the yellow brick road that it doesn’t matter who’s behind the curtain turning the wheel and barking into the microphone? If we only had a brain, a heart, and the nerve, we might find our way home from this nightmare. Ain’t it the truth? Ain’t it the truth?
Does anybody anymore think about the “huddled masses yearning to be free”? I don’t hear about yearning to be free beyond occasional lip service these days — ironic, that, since freedom was the whole idea in the first place. These cranky old men who want to run the place, and the people behind the curtain who are actually running it, they’re more about “here’s what I’ll do when I’m elected” and not so much about “I know you yearn to be free, so I’ll leave you alone.” Trust freedom? What a concept.
My old friend Henry David T. Said it best — the government that governs best is the one that governs not at all.
I think I will spend election season huddled in my corner, yearning to be free, and see if anyone gives a flying flamingo about my yearnings.
I probably come across as naive when I call for an end to war.
“You’re fighting basic human nature, it’s just a fact of life that there are brutal beasts among us,” you might say, or, “We’ve always done it this way. Even Jesus said there will always be wars and rumors of war.”
But isn’t the point of civilization to put brutishness behind us?
Someone has to say it, so I guess I will: War is a crime against humanity, no matter who is waging it.
As someone who is experiencing firsthand what a few years can do to a mind and body, I am seeing the the value of setting a mandatory retirement age for people who wish to wield the power of the empire. Let’s say presidents and legislators and justices need to retire before their 75th birthday. If they turn 75 before the end of the next term, then a special election would be held a few months earlier so there can be a smooth transition on their birthday.
Or in the case of the president, voters would go into the booth knowing how much of the next term would be served by the vice presidential candidate. We could even make the Coot in Chief’s 75th birthday a national holiday to celebrate the successor’s inauguration.
I’m going to be 71 later this month, and my father and grandfathers all lived to be 85 or older, so my genes suggest I have plenty of useful years left. But I would not ever suggest that someone much older than I should be put in charge of running an enterprise that endeavors to rule a nation of 300 million people. Why, the very idea is just so — oh, what’s the word I’m trying to think of?
Frankly, I think the whole enterprise has run amok and pray for a day when it really is shut down, but all the more reason to have someone in charge who doesn’t have to fight the aging process on top of everything else.
It’s really time for my generation to be tending to less strenuous tasks, like loving grandchildren, growing tomatoes or writing pithy poems. It’s time for you young’uns to take over, Lord help us.
