There is another side to H.L. Mencken’s wonderful quote that I often cite — “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary” — and that is that some of the hobgoblins are real, not imaginary. And most of those, of course, are practical politicians.
There’s another side to Tom Petty’s wonderful quote I use all the time — “Most things I worry about never happen anyway” — and that is that some things I worry about do happen sometimes.
Zig Ziglar said that when his guy did not win the presidency, he would give himself 24 hours to feel miserable, and then he would pick himself up, dust himself off, and say, “Well, this man is my president.”
Consider this my 24 hours.
A man who fantasized publicly about putting bullets into a political adversary and his children was elected attorney general of Virginia on Tuesday, as was a liar who promised a socialist utopia in New York City.
Words have a way of frightening me, because I think scary people choose their words carefully. The words the Third Reich employed were especially frightening, because they hypnotized otherwise reasonable people into condoning unspeakable horrors.
I have never said out loud or written down how uncomfortable I am about the agency named Homeland Security, because its name scares me. The word Homeland in that context is too similar for my tastes to “Fatherland,” the Reich’s appellation for Germany.
Similarly, I wonder why anyone would embrace a label like “democratic socialist” as if that was a good thing to be. The phrase is too close to “national socialist” not to give me pause. It was the national socialists of Germany who wreaked such havoc in the 1930s and 1940s. No nation should aspire to go there again. The greatest horrors of the 20th century arose from the embrace of socialism and its cousin, communism, but it seems that time has taken the edge off that terror and made those terms acceptable in civilized company again.
These thoughts are off-brand for a guy who wrote a book called Refuse to be Afraid, but I must admit I am afraid of history repeating itself as Powers That Be work to make our Fatherland secure and national socialists draw huge crowds. It will be different this time, the socialists promise. They always make that promise, history shows, and just like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, once in power they yank the promise away to reveal their true nature. Perhaps those mesmerized by socialist promises are even too young to know who Lucy and Charlie Brown are, and they need instead to hear the old fable about the scorpion who hitched a ride across the river.
Of course, the point of Refuse to be Afraid was not that fear isn’t real or that there is nothing to be afraid of; the point was that we should not let our fear control our actions. And so I’m giving myself these 24 hours to fret — taking no action except to write down these thoughts — and tomorrow I’ll pick myself up and dust myself off. My only solace is that that man is not attorney general of my state and that man is not the mayor of any city near me — yet.
